Nerve Endings Firing Away

According to a recent report, CNN lost over 40 percent of its viewers compared to 2009 and has spurred debate of how to revamp the first 24 hours cables news network. Sandwiched between the hard right Fox News and soft liberal MSNBC, CNN has straddled the confused middle swinging right and left erratically. Suggestions in a Politico article by Michael Calderone titled, How to Fix CNN highlights suggestions from media people. The usual go-the-Fox-MSNBC way and become more confrontational and create drama suggestions abound. Bringing back Crossfire that Jon Stewart so famously eviscerated is not going to help CNN. The one suggestion that I found myself nodding along to is by Jay Rosen, the professor from NYU Journalism School:

At 7 p.m., he would rename John King’s show “Politics is Broken,” and focus on “bringing outsiders to Beltway culture and Big Media into the conversation dominated by…. Beltway culture and Big Media.”

Rosen would program “Thunder on the Right” at 8 p.m., a show where a well-informed liberal “mostly covers the conservative movement and Republican coalition and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are right leaning.”

The following hour would be “Left Brained,” a show offering the opposite mix of hosts and guests. And at 10 p.m. would be “Fact Check,” an accountability show with major crowdsourcing elements” that would cut through “the week’s most outrageous lies, gimme-a-break distortions and significant misstatements with no requirement whatsoever to make it come out equal between the two parties on any given day, week, month or season.”

Fox and MSNBC are clearly more about politics than news reporting. MSNBC even calls itself a Place for Politics. So their interest is primarily in conflict and political machinations instead of the world of governing that most consider boring. According to the two networks, governing is something that politicians squeeze in while they are not contesting elections. It is about the process and not the means hence the bad rap that such news channel receive.

Personally, I think the best hope for CNN is not to be partisan but instead be non-partisan and take on an intermediary fact-check role that independent voters and citizens can tune into for hard facts and news reporting instead of rhetoric that Fox and MSNBC passes off as news. And of course, get rid of that boring staid Wolf Blitzer and let Larry King retire in peace.