Links are at the end, horrified.
Dan Froomkin had thoughts at his Press Watch newsletter.1
Licht has tried to make CNN neutral political territory, most notably by firing bold truth-tellers like Brian Stelter and John Harwood who minced no words when it came to calling out the tornado of lies spawned by Trump, Fox News, and the rest of the MAGA ecosystem.
Licht made it clear to the remaining CNN staffers that they should shove the contentious talk about Trump, in an attempt to appeal to more conservative voters; that they should not “take sides”.
What CNN journalists made clear in turn, on Wednesday night, is that in the Trump era, standing up for the truth absolutely requires you to engage in behavior that looks very much to one side like you’re taking the other. You simply cannot be a legitimate journalist and be neutral about Donald Trump.
“Licht” is CNN CEO Chris Licht, whom Froomkin thinks should turn in his head on the way out the door. I think that for whatever reason, Froomkin is deliberately understating what the guy is trying to create at the company, that being a right-wing platform trading on CNN’s undeserved reputation as a reliably truthful network. Froomkin, one of the best press critics around, is certainly overstating Brian Stelter’s credentials, but maybe it’s a comparative thing.
Does the network still use James Earl Jones’s voice? I remember watching the first Shockinaw show in Iraq, with Bernard Shaw visibly developing a case of PTSD in his Baghdad hotel room, and Jones’s tagline running between martial celebration segments. Last time I watched anything more than clipped snippets of anything on any news outlet; 30 years and yet I still know stuff without teevee news. Anyway, it does appear that at least some journalists have refined their approaches to Trump.
Froomkin is a fine writer, too, not just a fine critic.
Coming right out of the town hall, CNN’s star anchors completely refused to appear neutral – because to do so would have violated every jot and tiddle of their journalistic principles.
And they didn’t only pan Trump, they expressed horror at the bizarre, ravening audience that Licht had pulled together.
“Ravening!” “Jot and tiddle!” One needn’t always throw in some wake-up words for the reader (and for the writer’s own satisfaction), but they’re welcome.
Individual reporters and critics working at the big news outfits may have learned some lessons from Trump’s first campaign and presidency, but not necessarily complete ones; the people who run the outfits are still out to lunch.
Frank Bruni, who is bad at recognizing grand flaws, said in the New York Times that CNN had to give Trump air time as the leading GOP candidate; their mistake was providing him with a homer audience. He also criticized Trump for a lack of adjectival variety and a surfeit of pig-ignorant crassness.2
The audience was an obvious mistake—although one member of it, a non-Trumpist Republican operative, says that the audience weren’t uniformly ravening, but Trump supporters were permitted to applaud and cheer while opponents were forbidden from booing3—and Trump would have said so if CNN packed half the house with vocal supporters for anybody else's town hall. He used them for real-time feedback on what will play to the base, whose votes will win him the GOP nomination. Had CNN proscribed town halls for Trump, though, they’d’ve had to do so for everybody, which they wouldn't because they'd lose piles of money.
And repetition is something Trump has acknowledged that he does to reinforce his message. (I’d suggest he also does it to desensitize reporters.) What he repeatedly says is what his supporters will repeat. And they like a good sprinkling of the crass.
So the audience was poorly handled in composition and instruction, but there had to be one. The critical errors were hanging a lone moderator out there as an impediment to Trump’s tsunami of lies and mischaracterizations, and not introducing him as a certified sex criminal and accused fraud and seditionist. CNN knew what he was going to say and how he would say it—as Bruni noted, Trump is nothing if not repetitive—and they should have at least cued up some rebuttals, many of which could have been him contradicting himself, which would have given his detractors in the crowd something to applaud and cheer.
Anyway. CNN really did fuck it all up. Looking forward to the George Santos town hall; his best bet now is to run for president.
“It's just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.”
Novelist and journalist Cory Doctorow has a link-rich screed on a favorite subject ‘round these parts: Pirate equity’s considered destruction of health care, including the hospice care he refers to in the pull quote.4
Migraine day. I got nothing else but the music. Share if you like, consider subscribing if you’ve not—it’s free unless you want to pay.
Bettie Serveert, “Damaged Good”5