THIS IS CNN: Don Lemon goes berserker on Kaitlan Collins

David Zaslav is a Jewish man who lives in New York and whose personal donations to political candidates have gone almost entirely to Democrats. The idea that he wants CNN to be Newsmax is just a silly narrative. What he wants is ratings. The supposed plan for that was to become the "both sides" news network rather than an "advocacy" network. Part of why that might fail miserably is that there are people who have turned that into "wants CNN to be Newsmax." Maybe actual advocacy is the only kind of network that actually can garner any ratings.

 

Nobody will watch. People don't want objectivity. They want commentary on the news that feeds whatever it is they want to believe. Way too many people want affirmation, not news, and it's gotten to the level of people sticking fingers in their ears. Interest in actual news has been declining for decades.

I agree with you that the fatal mistake in journalism is always thinking that objectivity means having to strain to show "both sides." Unfortunately, though, the news has been 1) dominated by politics, especially since Trump, and 2) the country was infected by interest politics pre Trump (and I think this is largely what LED TO Trump), where people divide themselves into groups and politicians deal in interest peddling. Trump took that to a very divisive level, obviously, and worse for CNN he cast them as having a "side." As long as that is the discourse in this country, there may not be much of an audience for CNN regardless of how it tries to rebrand itself. The best thing that could happen for them, in my opinion, would be a huge news story that pushes U.S. politics into the background, like a high-tech war that involves the U.S. They obviously have no control over that.

On a "both sides" strategy. ... what was clear from the Trump debacle was that people want affirmation and exclusion in their coverage so much that "both sides" looked to be a formula for "neither side will watch you."

 

Point taken.

And the narrative that David Zaslav wants to turn CNN into Newsmax is still absurd. He is a media executive with decades in the OTA and cable TV businesses (in a non ideological way) and now has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock options tied up in the WarnerMedia merger.

He wants ratings. He's the kind of guy who would have tried to turn CNN into the Home Shopping Network if he had thought that was the path to turning it around.

This is not about ideology, and the fact that people have actually created that kind of motive for a guy like David Zaslav gets to my point about how people have turned this into "Red Sox versus Yankees," and if you don't seem to root for their team, you obviously root for the other one.