What went wrong at CNN?

Let me start this note with a disclosure: I’m an economic analyst for the network, and so not unbiased. What’s more, I’ve never met Chris Licht, who recently stepped down as head of the network after a damning piece in The Atlantic. That said, I think the network is getting a bit too much negative press these days for recent efforts to move into the political mid-ground between MSNBC and Fox.

Licht was clearly an insecure and ineffectual leader if The Atlantic piece is to be believed. The bit where he’s in the gym doing squats and telling the journalist interviewing him that his predecessor Jeff Zucker “could never do this” was priceless. It never ceases to amaze me what people who aren’t quite comfortable in their own skin will tell a journalist, particularly those in the media business themselves! Nevertheless, he had what I think is the right central strategy for the network: delivering real news to people who are sick of hardcore opinions that veer too far right or left. 

I very much believe that there is an exhausted middle in this country that is in the market for something less opinionated and more fact-based. But getting there as a cable news channel is very difficult. Cable news rose on outrage content, generated first by Fox and later by MSNBC. CNN definitely moved into the opinion space on many shows during the Trump era (though I’d argue that it also did plenty of real news reporting and analysis, and has a number of high quality prime time shows like Fareed Zakaria GPS, Amanpour, and Anderson Cooper 360 as well as first rate original documentaries). 

Trump was a ratings gold mine for cable networks, CNN in particular, in part because the president himself spent so much airtime pillorying the network. 

But I always suspected that the end of the Trump era would also kick-start the hollowing out of cable news, mirroring what print news has experienced in the past decade or two, as readers migrated online.

To a generation brought up on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, cable news is slow and boring. And highly produced TV news programming can often feel dated in today’s gritty, user-driven social media news cycle. I’m amazed that TV news hasn’t been faster to move away from heavily made-up anchors in jewel-toned dresses and dark suits sitting at long surfboard-like tables, chatting in ways that all too often seem utterly artificial. I thought that the slightly more natural presentation style that was part of the pandemic work from home phenomenon would free us from that, but it hasn’t really. It’s mostly business as usual again. 

The network also has the classic scale problem. When you are that big and profitable (even post-Trump, profits have been around a billion dollars a year which is something that most news organisations would salivate over) it’s hard to grow fast, especially if you’re trying to deliver more serious content to people who are used to being titillated 24/7. As with many media properties, future profits probably lie more in trying to raise margins than in trying to grow sheer numbers. And it could be that we’re simply at a pivot point where cable news, like network news, is a dinosaur. Perhaps only a few species will survive — and even the survivors are likely to take smaller forms.

That said, there are plenty of things that CNN could do — particularly in the upcoming news cycle — to appeal to those in the exhausted middle. I think deep dive, data driven explainers on issues that will keep coming up again and again, such as immigration, guns, inflation, even China, could be great. In fact, CNN+ was doing a bit of that in some pilots before the plug was pulled on the streaming network. There’s also a good amount of de-siloing and right sizing that might be done. In television as in print media I’ve always found that being smaller can be an advantage in terms of leveraging talent and resources across the network. When you’re big, you don’t always have to share resources and talent, and that means that ideas get missed.

What I’d love to see CNN do over the next two years is send its still extremely large cadre of reporters out into the field to look at, say, how the Inflation Reduction Act is rolling out and what it means for real communities, or how swing states are responding to the federal money dump that is coming their way and what it will mean for politics. They could also leverage their huge international bureau network to connect the dots between what’s happening in the US and the world. Of course that’s a lot to ask for in three minutes snippets. It could be that doing more serious long-form reporting simply makes you look more like PBS — which would be a good thing in my mind content wise, but a terrible thing for ratings.

Ed I’m curious if you watch CNN, or television at all these days, and if so what you think the future of the networks will be in the digital age, particularly as we enter an election cycle that (as you put it in your last Note) may be driven by AI deepfake content? 

Recommended reading

• I thought this Wall Street Journal piece on how digital customer ratings have become meaningless was very sharp. It reminded me of the episode of Black Mirror in which people high score everything and everyone, because nobody wants to be blackballed themselves. This creates a culture of inauthenticity in which everyone is miserable, even as they’re clicking all those smiley faces. 

• And I’m going to focus the rest of my recommendations on the many good pieces in the FT this week: First, I enjoyed the wonderful Henry Mance interview with anti-monarchy activist Graham Smith, looking at why the British royals should be abolished. (I love that he called them taxed-funded Kardashians, so true.) 

• I also thought John Plender was absolutely right about AI and why this is the real deal, not another dotcom bubble.

• Finally I enjoyed my commentary colleagues Sarah O’Connor on how the dream of working anywhere in the digital age is colliding with the reality of national tax and immigration laws, as well as Gideon Rachman on how America is reshaping the world economy.

Edward Luce responds

Rana, I confess I barely watch any cable channels except when there is serious news breaking or a big event, such as a presidential debate. Mostly this is for the reasons that you list. To keep costs down, the cable executives fill most of their time with talking heads, and far too little of it with on-the-ground reporting. Inevitably, therefore, almost everything is filtered through the tired prism of who is up and who is down, rather than the underlying policy issues. I think most of this is about keeping overheads down, but I fear some of it also reflects audience bias. CNN has been among the worst in labelling even minor developments as “breaking news” and so hyping the trivial that it often resembles a giant cry wolf operation. When something serious happens, which, alas, reflects the times in which we live, how are we supposed to tell the difference?

I also think CNN bears quite a large responsibility for amplifying Trump, who has always been good for business. It is hard to trust a brand that keeps rewarding a political figure who depicts our profession as enemies of the people. Chris Licht’s firing was clearly deserved and partly reflects his terrible decision to pack Trump’s recent town hall with ultra-Maga supporters. Quite what possessed him to do that I cannot guess. But as long as CNN, and other channels, keep making these basic mistakes, I find it hard to take them seriously as journalistic outfits. Our mission should be to go out there and talk to people and report on their everyday lives. It should also be to hold power to account. Right now, the model seems to be to talk chiefly among ourselves and play very dangerous symbiotic games with America’s aspiring autocrat. Things can only get better.