The end of an error.
Since everyone and their crazy tweeting uncle is weighing in on the Chris Licht topping at CNN, I can’t resist joining the chant. This comes from smidge of experience: mid-aughts, I had a minutes-long brush up against the network as a small part of a tiny squad that was brought in to help another quickly fired CNN CEO parse a brand path forward.
The motivation: they were urgently trying to figure out how Roger Ailes and Fox had so clearly trumped them, and how to get back on the board.
The honest answer was that Ailes, a take-no-prisoners Republican political media stud, had been first to spot the main chance. According to David Townsend, a top Democratic political consultant who once worked with Ailes, it was “running the network like an election campaign,” pandering to the base and relentlessly staying on the day’s message.
For my money, it was different church, same pew: Ailes was the first to recognize the monetized value of confirmation bias—“I watch thems that tells me what I already believes.”
No matter, it didn’t help the clarity of thinking that the senior CNN folks—like most in the category—were trying to calibrate their future by staring down the endless hall of media mirrors. From that perspective, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot has changed:
CNN is still locked into its primary role as the “crisis go-to” and that’s a major ratings speedbump unless we’re in a constantly exhausting state of crisis. Nothing different now: “May all your crises, be global crises,” was our team leader’s benediction at a couple of meetings.
The bad news was Ailes beating the world to the demolition of media credibility and the redefinition of “truth” as a variable. The worse, for TV as a whole, and cable in particular, was and is fragmentation that makes it ever more daunting to play catch up.
The good news was that CNN, strategically lagging on air, still managed to get ahead of the curve on digital. Would be willing to place long odds network revenues are still seeing big plusses from that side of the marketing house. Makes sense: CNN watchers are, absent the crisis looky-loos, total news junkies. They really do want to know if Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s illness—he got sick on a recent Moscow trip—was life threatening or just a cold.
Last, but not least, by all accounts it wasn’t the falling audience share, the misbegotten Trump town hall, or staff alienation that did Licht in. It was a Greek tragedy of an article in the Atlantic.
Like I say, same as it ever was.
Adding two unasked-for cents, I’d also argue that where Licht and David Zaslav, his boss, went wrong was a strategic mis-focus combined with resulting executional misfires. According to the Atlantic story, the stated mission was to “restore” CNN as the bedrock of unbiased centrist journalism. Unfortunately, that ship has long sailed and they really didn’t need to see around corners to know what would happen to their fan base by damning the torpedoes and steaming full speed ahead.
My contention: instead of focusing on the far shore of journalistic Camelot, they needed to go back even further to realize what made CNN such a disruptor in its early days—unarguably gritty authenticity. If I’d had the chance during that branding speed-date, I was going to argue they needed to have Wolf Blitzer shatter the increasingly formalized plastic sets with a sledgehammer, evocative of a brand promise to deliver immediacy, global reach, and the story no one else could tell. Closer to CNN International than the dull, repetitive US version.
Ironically, Licht partially got there; witness the new emphasis on anchor standups and a more dynamic camera movement. But instead of delivering the unvarnished insider perspective that would have been—and still could be—the network’s lifeline, those sets are even more plastic fantastic than ever. Sadly, now populated by less interesting and/or more constrained journalists.
Therein lies the true missed opportunity.