Fact: a lot of cities are covered in smoke right now.
Fact: a lot of cities are covered in smoke right now because the boreal forest is on fire.
Fact: a lot of cities are covered in smoke right now because the boreal forest is on fire, thanks to unseasonably warm temperatures.
Fact: a lot of cities are covered in smoke right now because the boreal forest is on fire, thanks to unseasonably warm temperatures that anthropogenic warming has made normal.
Fact: a lot of cities are covered in smoke right now because the boreal forest is on fire, thanks to unseasonably warm temperatures that anthropogenic warming has made normal, the inevitable result of certain companies and the right-wing denying the evidence for decades to prevent any action.
All facts, I promise. Which one were you hoping for?
Indeed! The reality is that there is not perfect news outlet that is going to find a way to be entirely neutral. It just doesn’t exist, especially in these especially divided times.
Exactly. The whole problem here is contained in the phrase “Licht, reportedly following a mandate from Zaslav, attempted to move the news brand to the political center and make it more palatable to both conservative viewers and GOP newsmakers.” (From the NBC report.)
If you triangulate against the MAGA tendency, you are nowhere near the centre of the political spectrum.
I agree that it’s still positive profit for Fox but they have been at this game for decades to grooming their audiences. CNN’s audience politic is no where near hard right like Fox’s. At best, they’re centrist. In which case, if they turn 180 and becoming tr*mp megaphone, they can expect the same outcome like Twitter. Are they hoping to become FauxNews rival? I don’t see it happen with current FN’s audience because if they leave Fox, they’re more likely to move to OAN or NewMax, not CNN. So they can’t bleed FN’s audience and at the same time, alienating their current viewers. I’m not sure what is their end game here. Murdoch had been bank rolling the propaganda machine for decades. I don’t think CNN with their next quarter mentality can play the same long game. They’re finished the moment they hosted Tromp’s town hall
Do they not teach the Overton window in journalism school anymore? How could anyone think the media in America needs to move more to the right? It already leans right simply by failing to do its job of speaking truth to right wing power.
…and the Toronto Star gets dragged through the mud as some sort of liberal trash tabloid because they report actual facts on the Ford family, which all other media refused to do for so long. Real journalism isn’t dying- we are killing it.
I subscribe to Talking Points Memo. I find Josh Marshall, the publisher there, to have a perspective I value. This was his take on the Licht situation:
Licht is a hotshot TV guy. He was showrunner on Morning Joe and Colbert, neither of which suggest a strong overt ideological bent. The real driver of all this appears to be his boss, Zaslav. He seems broadly reviled by a lot of people in media. But at least from his political giving, he seems to be at least nominally a Democrat. Who executives give money to doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot. But it gives you some sense of the importance of their politics in shaping their business practices. But he’s not the only one in the mix. The real money player behind all of this is longtime media titan John Malone. And he’s definitely that Republican billionaire. His comments through this very much match what you’d expect if an octogenarian Fox viewer took ownership of CNN and tried to “fix” it in line with the Fox worldview.
Wherever this plan came from, the salient point is that it’s not failing because Licht did a poor job implementing it. It’s simply based on misunderstanding the contemporary media and political landscape and almost everything about cable news. What’s too bad is that CNN, which for all its shortcomings is or at least was a thing of great value, is in the process of being thoroughly trashed.
Earlier, Marshall pointed out (paraphrasing here) that you can’t have a centrist news network when one political side only sees enemies and friends. If you describe that side accurately, they’ll think you are an enemy.
Just watching ten minutes of Amy Goodman reporting the headlines on Democracy Now! is enough to demonstrate how difficult it can be to ensure governments or organizations respect human rights. I need a daily unicorn chaser after watching it.
We’ve seen that chart before and it doesn’t have much to do with reality. As @the_borderer points out it has the Daily Mail as centrist…somehow it has CNN as skewing left even now, as well as the New York Times…none of the versions of Fox News quite make it down to being selective, incomplete, unfair persuasion, or propaganda despite the fact that it’s basically their whole raison d’être…it clearly has its own slant that is not actually toward the middle.
I need a daily unicorn chaser after watching it.