Amazon CEO donates for gay marriage law

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, said Friday they are donating $2.5 million to the campaign to defend Washington’s same-sex marriage law. With the gift, Washington United for Marriage has raised more than $5 million for its referendum campaign. But its leader says the group is still the underdog. In 32 previous elections nationally, same-sex advocates have lost. presidential election year,” said Jeffrey McCall, a DePauw University communications professor who wrote the book “Viewer Discretion Advised: Taking Control of Mass Media Influences” on TV news organizations. He said it confirms that things had reached a crisis point: “CNN has just run aground in recent years.”

Walton will stay on through the end of the year at the network he joined 30 years ago when it was a fledgling company started by Ted Turner. CNN, the first 24-hour television news network, has its headquarters in Atlanta and now has 4,000 employees worldwide.

In his time as president of CNN Worldwide, Walton built a profitable international brand and started two of CNN’s most notable shows: “Anderson Cooper 360” and “The Situation Room.”

But ratings have suffered for years, since long before Walton took over as president. Fox News, founded in 1996, began beating CNN in prime time in 2001. In 2010, MSNBC, al- so born in 1996, started moving ahead of CNN in prime time. CNN’s prime-time viewers fell 35 percent during the second quarter of 2012, compared with a year earlier.

Explanations vary. Some, like McCall, say CNN tried too hard to create prime-time “personalities,” like Cooper and Piers Morgan, which hurt its news focus. Others point to CNN’s reluctance to aim programming at partisan audiences.

Walton’s announcement came the first day of the summer Olympics and weeks before the Republican and Democratic national conventions, chances for CNN to boost ratings.

Breaking news has been the sweet spot for CNN and CNN.com, as Japan’s earthquake and tsunami showed last year. Videos were played a record 60 million times on CNN.com. The website also received 75 million page views a day — up 66 percent from the year before — for the first 10 days of the subsequent nuclear disaster. Network viewership in the U.S. shot up 67 percent that month.

Walton’s strategy was to attract viewers, including those in the 25- to 54-year-old key advertising demographic, with original news content. While other news organizations had cut overseas coverage, CNN beefed up its international presence, expanding in places like the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Kenya, Chile and India.

CNN has tinkered with the length and time of shows, as well as trying to bring in fresh talent. In recent years, it lost longtime, popular anchors and correspondents — Christiane Amanpour, Larry King, Lou Dobbs — largely to other networks. Chief national correspondent John King’s show was canceled this year. The “Crossfire”-type show with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and columnist Kathleen Parker flopped. Off the airwaves, CNN/US President Jon Klein was fired in 2010, replaced by former HLN President Ken Jautz.

One TV news expert suggested the question for CNN is not whether it has to make still more dramatic changes, but when.

“They’re adrift,” said Richard Hanley, an assistant professor in the school of communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and a veteran observer of the cable news wars. “Cable news clearly has to have some point of view in order to succeed now, as Fox [News] has proven and as MSNBC is trying to do. Outside of when major news events are happening, hitting it right down the middle in terms of balance doesn’t work anymore. Rightly or wrongly, that’s where it is now.”

In a May 2011 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walton said he believed CNN’s reputation as a top-notch news organization would be compromised if an intentional political slant crept into news stories. “Successful businesses know who they are,” he said, and “Good journalism is good business for us.”

In insisting that CNN “is going to have to plant its flag somewhere,” Hanley admitted, “I don’t know where it will be.”

Ralph Begleiter, a CNN correspondent from 1981 to 1999 who is now the director of the University of Delaware’s center for political communication, said he thought Walton “was a terrific leader for the institution. He started in sports and made an unbelievable transition to overall management and news administration.”

Begleiter said CNN employees respect Walton, “but I understand why CNN would be going through management changes. The environment has changed drastically from when I was there.”