CNN Embarrasses Itself Big Time in Prime Time
News is a business. Ask Chris Licht. CNN’s Trump show drew 3.3 million viewers equaling Tucker Carlson before he was canned. it’s a draw, right? Oh yeah, and news, too.
It’s hard not to suppress the gag reflex when reading explanations from Chris Licht, the CEO of CNN, defending what was presumably his greenlight to pave the news network’s prime time with Donald Trump’s lies wall to wall. As reported by Brian Stelter, CNN’s one-time media reporter, Licht’s Thursday-morning-after defense of the editorial decision rose to a level of inanity that nearly equaled the heights of mendacity reached by Trump on Wednesday night.
Reviews of Trump’s fertilizer fest, of course, have fit the usual pack journalism mold. The forecast from political scribblers amounts to a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious. Trump’s performance is a back-to-the-future preview of the primary campaign to come. “Political analysts and strategists” are chronicling Democrats’ public glee and Republicans’ private kvetching. And journalists including at CNN are bemoaning a network whoring after ratings, all the while churning out copy on the 2024 that looks to all the world like Campaign 2016 2.0.
Licht’s fingerprints are all over CNN’s New Hampshire town hall. Journalism? Morning and late night shows, giggles, guffaws, today’s ‘developments’ here or there: news as entertainment is Licht’s thing. And Fox’s $787 million face plant or not, Chris has bosses, including one who sincerely admires Rupert Murdoch’s professional standards. John Malone, a board member of Warner Brothers/Discovery, the owner of CNN, spoke clearly in 2021 when he called Fox News the best in the news business. It’s a safe bet Licht listened up. After all, who better than CNN could offer Trump a “fair and balanced” hour in the “Live Free or Die” state?
Licht also delivered a national message in his morning-after missive to CNN’s masses. If anyone harbored the idea CNN had learned a lesson from boosting Trump’s politically carcinogenic lies via incessant coverage of his antics in 2016 and after, recall the words over the entry to Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” For Licht, no less than Leni Riefenstahl whose panoramas immortalized the Nuremberg crowds, CNN’s cameras on the hand-picked New Hampshire audience captured “a large swath of America.” He added, “While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was an important part of the story.”
Like the scoreboard in the Roman colosseum that read “Lions 1, Christians 0”, Licht, of course, had to speak up for his chosen sacrificial star. Praising Kaitlin Collins, one of the network’s celebrity correspondents, he called her job well done. “Kaitlan pressed (Trump) again and again and made news. Made a LOT of news." Kudos to Kaitlin for staying in the ring, of course. But offering Trump prime time to repeat lies he’s told for years and calling it “news?” Licht needs to check either his dictionary, or the chargers on his digital devices. If he believes perennial prevarication is a breaking story, it seems he’s been out of touch for a decade or so.
On Thursday evening, CNN’s highly paid help did its best to clean up their CEO’s mess. Wolf Blitzer ran a segment featuring clips of the New Hampshire baby boom cohort during the town hall Q&A tossing softballs to Trump, who batted them over the far right field fence. The reporter who packaged the piece earnestly identified Trump’s falsehoods as if he’d discovered Top Secret/Codeword revelations. Only Chevy Chase outdid the performance 40 years ago when, as the news anchor on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” he opened the faux-news segment each week with the announcement that “General Franco was still dead.”
Anderson Cooper’s custodial effort followed Blitzer’s. Acknowledging the brickbats from CNN viewers, Cooper condescendingly expressed “understanding” for anyone upset by Trump’s starring appearance on the network followed by a segue into Licht’s ‘this was all news’ script. Cooper suggested CNN’s motive in airing an hour of Trump’s non-stop lies was to warn the viewing public about what would be coming in a Trump presidential campaign—as if any American with an IQ of a mushroom wasn’t already aware of the country’s likely plight.
A plurality of Americans get their news from television. Streaming or broadcast, its coverage provides the grist that subsequently shows up in their curated news feeds or elsewhere online. With print journalism dying via its slow but steady economic strangulation, civic literacy rates falling at a no less alarming rate, and TikTok-inspired video eliminating for many, the need to read anything at all, the substance of what appears on air matters more and more, even ironically at that very substance steadily disappears.
But what do you expect? Television is entertainment as well as a business. Ask Chris Licht. CNN’s Trump show drew 3.3 million viewers equaling Tucker Carlson’s audience before he was canned. The lesson is obvious: if you hand pick the crowd, bring in a guest with a popular shtick, and put your celebrity correspondents on stage mano-a-mano, it’s a draw, right? Oh yeah, and news. That, too.