AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
Brian Stelter begins his Washington Post column on CNN’s future with a question that has somehow become provocative.
“The recruiters of CNN’s new chief executive should pose this question to every candidate,” writes Stelter. “What should an anchor do when a guest says something untrue?” Perhaps this is the operative question for CNN’s talent, but for many viewers, the more relevant one is this: What should management do when an anchor says something untrue? Or commits a lesser offense, like treating an opinion as unassailable truth or verifiably false based on who expresses it?
These are the kinds of questions that deposed CEO Chris Licht sought to answer during his brief tenure atop the network. Stelter, who was let go by Licht last August, appears less enthralled by them.
Stelter dismisses Licht’s “‘both sides’ vision,” which he says “tactically fails on live TV,” and charges him with seeking to put forward a product that was merely “inoffensive, predictable, safe.” He continued:
Viewers no longer agree on the same set of facts, much less express interest in the same topics. CNN cannot ignore the extremist attitudes shaping our politics or claim that Jan. 6, 2021, was a protest that just got out of hand.
We live in an age that requires a muscular form of TV journalism, one that defends truth against a torrent of lies — and accepts that the truth-telling will spur backlash from some viewers.
Is this a fair summation of Licht’s perspective? Did he want his talent to subordinate the truth to the appearance of fairness?
In Tim Alberta’s deadly profile of Licht, the executive described his mission as being to turn CNN into a place that viewers would feel has “no agenda other than the truth.” In fact, he directly answered Stelter’s question.
“If something’s a lie, you call it a lie,” he stated unequivocally. But Licht wasn’t so sure that that’s what the network had done over the course and in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency.
“I think he [Trump] changed the rules of the game, and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it,” he offered. “And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on. Because guess what? It didn’t work. Being in the game with the jersey on didn’t change anyone’s mind.”
That was the heart of Licht’s argument — not that the media needed to pretend to ignore the obvious about Trump — but that it shouldn’t allow him to warp their view of just about everything.
And make no mistake, the pre-Licht CNN was warped.
As the host of Reliable Sources, Stelter himself often rushed to issue the most sweeping condemnation of every move by a Republican and impassioned defense of every Democrat in the crosshairs.
To Stelter, the Hunter Biden laptop story was a “manufactured scandal” and a “classic example of the right-wing media machine.” Trump’s status as a puppet of the Russian government, on the other hand, was hardly in question.
“Trump’s odd behavior with Vladimir Putin is compelling so many people to ask: What does Putin have on Trump? Has Trump been compromised?” pontificated Stelter on one occasion.
He suggested that Michael Avenatti was a serious contender for the White House, characterized opposition to the 1619 Project as a “whitelash,” and insisted that “we may never really know” what happened to actor/hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett in the face of plenty of evidence of what happened to him.
Of course, CNN’s sins greatly outnumber Stelter’s. It promoted Nathan Phillips’ lies about the students at Covington Catholic days after they’d already been debunked. Jim Sciutto erroneously reported that a U.S. asset had been pulled out of Russia because Trump’s indiscretions had put them in danger. A quartet of CNN journalists erroneously reported that Trump had lied about being told that he wasn’t under investigation. Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb erroneously reported that the Trump campaign had received hacked Democratic National Committee emails from Wikileaks prior to their being published online.
None of these errors were, by themselves, killing blows to the credibility of those who made them or their employers. Mistakes are inevitable in the news business.
What’s proven devastating is that each and every one of those exaggerations, false starts, and outright failures were made in one direction. The motivations that led to them were never a mystery to even less-perceptive viewers.
Licht recognized this as an ethical and business liability for the network and sought to tone down the partisan theatrics that marked CNN during the Trump administration. Its journalists might have seen that new direction as an affront to the work they did over the last half-decade, but outside the halls of CNN, its almost common wisdom that its Resistance TV model was no longer working.
Evidence had already begun to show that it was yielding diminishing returns. Under Licht’s more indulgent predecessor, Jeff Zucker, its ratings were already tanking. The network’s best chance at succeeding in a long-term competition with its rivals stood in transcending them, and presenting a high-quality product that might take years — and growing pains — to produce, but could ultimately win out. Licht knew that Trump would eventually fade from centerstage. And when that day comes, all that any outlet or journalist will have to show for themselves is their record.
There’s no doubt that Licht’s critics within CNN saw themselves as embroiled in a struggle that pitted goodness and truth against malice and deception. The sincerity of this belief in CNN’s Zucker-era ethos is palpable. But the question those still at the network should devote more time to answering is whether, in its zealous fervor, the network had turned into a Puritan echo chamber like the ones Stelter so often decried in conservative media.
Chris Licht’s ouster should point toward an answer.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
