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CNN's biggest problem may be its founding principles

Posted by John Law 4/5/2010 -- 9:24:23 AM

In an era when news flows like water, a network devoted to providing headlines topped with a touch of analysis no longer seems quite so useful, writes Michael Hirschorn. "If anything, sitting down for 22 minutes to watch a middlebrow mix of politics and weather that’s too proud to dabble more than passingly in the latest Hollywood crack-whoredom seems … inefficient."

News doesn't flow like water on television, including on CNN. There basically is no cable television news anymore, and that's CNN's fault. Hirschorn seems to believe that the CNN of today is pretty much like the CNN of Ted Turner. It's not even close.

The "low cost methods" he describes are no longer employed. Now they're paying Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and many others ridiculous amounts of money, not to mention the amounts they spend on set design, graphics, and gadgetry. Shiny things.

And while it's true that "a network devoted to providing headlines topped with a touch of analysis no longer seems quite so useful," that's not what CNN used to be. It used to be a news network. They spent money on reporting. They did analysis, too, but most of the day was filled with reports from reporters out in the field, reporting stories. Unearthing facts. Talking to sources. Being journalists.

"But CNN’s biggest problem may actually be its founding principles," Hirschorn says. I would argue just the opposite: that Time-Warner's *abandonment* of those principles is its biggest problem. It can't be obnoxious, ideological and angry like Fox or, to a lesser degree, MSNBC. It's only real choice is to bolster its reputation as a serious news outlet. Instead, it chose to go shallow -- to *pretend* to be a serious news outlet, while running a lot of lightweight shows and talking heads interspersed with the occasional actual news report. And witness the recent hiring of Erick Erickson, the obnoxious, incendiary frat-boy blogger whose main talent is to hurl insults. Would the old CNN have hired him? Of course not. They would have hired another nameless reporter. To report.

People still want news on television. As it stands, there are now 4 big cable news outlets, but often, there is no news to be found on cable. CNN could be the network that could always be relied upon to provide it.