There are norms and then there are norms, and the one that Biden transgressed by speaking so bluntly in Philadelphia came in response to the norm that Trump and so many on the right continue to transgress by pretending that the 2020 election was stolen. (Zeleny’s CNN colleague Brianna Keilar also called out the optics of positioning “Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech”.) Fair enough! Reporters should be free to criticize the optics of Biden’s choices-but they also shouldn’t lose sight of the ongoing context in which those choices reside. It can be tempting for journalists to take a speech such as Biden’s Independence Hall address and, when analyzing it, focus on how abnormal it is for a sitting president to call out factions in the opposing party as anti-democratic-and to do so “against a backdrop of two Marines standing at attention and the Marine Band,” as CNN correspondent Jeff Zeleny wrote on Twitter. Choosing false balance and milquetoast smarm over competent analysis serves no one except for those on the right who are actively attacking the nation’s democratic foundations for their own personal gain. Refraining from calling out egregious lies for fear that doing so will offend the liars’ constituencies is a form of cowardice that emboldens the liar and ill-serves the rest of us. If one political party claims that the presidential election was stolen, and the other says that it wasn’t, it is insufficient to just report the debate as if both sides have an equal claim on the truth. This brand of false balance has poisonous side effects. But what happens when the nation is, objectively, in an era where the right qualitatively deserves more and deeper criticism than the left? What happens when the right is led by a demagogue driven exclusively by self-interest and the left is led by an old dude who stutters sometimes? Should the choice be to adhere to some outdated fairness principle and criticize both sides in equal measure? Democracy needs its media outlets to cultivate adversarial relationships with all who hold the levers of political power. CNN-and, indeed, every hard-news outlet-should not align itself with any political party’s goals or fortunes. These lost viewers don’t want objective reporting: They want the network to suppress any and all criticism of Trump and the right, or at the very least to balance it out by criticizing Biden and the left in equal measure.ĬNN should criticize Biden and the left when they deserve it. CNN will be hard-pressed to win back the viewers who fled during the Trump era, because their flight wasn’t rational in the first place. But it’s also true that the dominant MAGA critique of CNN is not based on logical, objective responses to the network’s reporting and analysis: It’s based on Trump’s choice to thumb his nose at fact-based reporting while yelling “fake news, fake news” over and over. No party or standpoint holds a monopoly on media criticism, and there are intelligent critiques of CNN to be found on the left, the right, and in the middle. The point is that tacking to the middle in order to regain an authority that was largely the product of an expired era in media is a flawed strategy-and that constraining one’s reporters and analysts in response to bad-faith criticisms will ultimately make your network beholden to the biases of people who don’t actually value your work and will always just find some other dumb reason to hate you. Instead, we’ve got countless smaller outlets that reach audiences cohered by their pre-existing affinities, as well as hordes of loons with Twitter and YouTube accounts who will passionately argue that compression socks and yelling are the real cures for COVID-19. People have more options now, and the big names in news and opinion no longer serve the same unifying roles that they once did. CNN isn’t going to regain its pre-internet stature, because that stature was largely a function of the era’s structural limitations. Today, though, the sphere of consensus has fractured, and no single “neutral” outlet now exerts the same level of influence that their predecessors did on mainstream opinion. Back then, major networks and newspapers were able to wield significant influence within the country and their communities because they were basically the only game in town. CNN’s uniquely authoritative voice during the decade or so after its founding was largely the product of a constrained media environment in which news consumers lacked easy access to other options.
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