CNN: An ‘unbiased’ makeover
CNN’s “Project Centrism” has begun, said Erik Wemple in The Washington Post. Step one was the firing of its longtime media critic, Brian Stelter, the host of Reliable Sources for nine years. Ever since the election of Donald Trump, Stelter had focused on withering coverage of Fox News and its unholy propaganda alliance with the former liar-in-chief. “It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues,” Stelter said in his final show. But following the April merger between CNN’s owner WarnerMedia and Discovery, new CNN CEO Chris Licht and Warner Brothers billionaire investor John Malone made it clear they hope to lure back viewers alienated by the network’s critical coverage of Trump. Since Trump left office, ratings of all the cable networks have been in decline, said Clare Malone in The New Yorker. So CNN executives have decided to refocus on “unbiased” coverage of breaking news. The polarizing Stelter, they decided, endangered “their ability to appeal to a wider audience.”
Stelter’s bias tainted his reporting, said Ruben Navarrette Jr. in the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record. When a scandal involved Fox News, “he covered it breathlessly.” But he was late to the story when left-of-center CNN host Chris Cuomo got involved in his brother Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment scandal. Stelter’s liberal views led him to make a hero of anti-Trump lawyer and fraudster Michael Avenatti and to claim “we may never really know” what happened to hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett. No wonder viewers’ trust waned. Polling suggests Americans “believe all the major news networks but Fox lean liberal,” said Jennifer Graham in the Salt Lake City Deseret News. CNN is “smartly trying to reclaim the center,” though only time and ratings will tell whether “Americans really want news delivered neutrally.”
“I have bad news” for CNN’s new leadership, said Jonathan Last in The Bulwark. No matter what the network does, critics on the right and at Fox will continue to label CNN as hopelessly biased. That was true even when CNN, after Trump’s election, went on a spree of “both sides” political coverage and “affirmative-action conservative hires,” such as former Trump advisers Corey Lewandowski and Jason Miller, who spouted pure propaganda. Trump and Fox have trained conservatives to dismiss any legitimate news that threatens their beliefs. “There is nothing you can do to appease bad-faith critics.”