A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Can CNN Actually Get Worse? Apparently, It Can.

A right-wing billionaire is asserting his right-wing control.

Loyal Altercation readers would not have been surprised when CNN
announced it would be canceling its longest-running show-at 30
years-despite its quite good ratings, and firing its host of nine
years, because, no doubt, they'd read and likely memorized this post
from June 24
.
Everyone is denying that John Malone, the right-wing billionaire who is
behind the guy who is behind the guy who is in charge of remaking CNN,
had anything to do with it.

The New York Times published a hagiographic profile of Malone

this week in which he insisted that he was all in favor of "wacko"
programming so long as it was labeled as opinion. The Times reporter
also noted that Malone had attempted to recruit Rush Limbaugh and had
advised Rupert Murdoch when he decided to start Fox "News" and turn
it over to the right-wing sex criminal

and paranoid lunatic

Roger Ailes. This is presumably what Malone had in mind when he told the
Times, "I am an American," and "I do believe that these
organizations have a duty to try and bring the country together a little
bit, instead of trying to exploit differences endlessly."

"John Malone only watches CNN via Fox News," according to a recently
quoted CNN staffer
.
Also this week, a Times newsletter published a story about Chris
Stirewalt
,
authored by Blake Hounshell
and Jeremy W. Peters , that
noted that Stirewalt was the head of the Fox team's election night
decision desk, which declared Joe Biden the winner of Arizona in 2020,
despite the desperate protestations direct to Murdoch from Jared
Kushner. Not surprisingly, Stirewalt was fired. Now, he is "speaking
out about a network he says incites 'black-helicopter-level paranoia
and hatred.'" Yet the reporters call Stirewalt's "take" on Fox
"counterintuitive"-because, they write, he insists that
"offering content that tilts hard to the right" is "not to elect
Republicans or really even to help them at all ... Rather, it's about
making money."

This is actually the falsest of false choices. It's also impossible to
test, much less verify, since the only thing Fox has ever done since its
founding in 1996 is "tilt hard to the right"-that is, to lie on
behalf of its menu of white supremacy, nativism, Islamophobia, and
basically everything else while raking in billions of dollars of profit.

One, albeit hardly dispositive, argument in favor of Stirewalt's take
is the fact that the only people who appear to get any results from Fox
are not those who merely seek to shame the network but rather the people
who sue them for a lot of money. That latter category would include the
family of Seth Rich
,
whom the network repeatedly tortured after his murder by concocting
absurd stories about him, and more lately the manufacturers of Dominion
voting machines
.
Among the lunatic lies put forth by Fox's anchors in the aftermath of
the election were those of Maria Bartiromo, who insisted that Nancy
Pelosi had "an interest in this company," and Jeanine Pirro, who
speculated that "technical glitches" in Dominion's software
"could have affected thousands of absentee mail-in ballots." Writing
about the Dominion suit, the Times' Jeremy Peters has noted

that "the case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to
Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the
country." Thing is, Fox's "reputation" can be damaged only by
people who think it has one-that is, those who care nothing whatsoever
for truth or decency. Its lies and absence of "reputation" are no
secret to anyone who cares to look.

Back to CNN's firing of Brian Stelter. He closed out his final show
with this patriotic plea :
"It's not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and
dialogue. It's not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It's
required. It's patriotic. We must make sure we don't give platforms
to those who are lying to our faces." To that, we at Altercation can
only reply, "Right on, my brother." Alas, he loses us with his next
sentence: "But we also must make sure we are representing the full
spectrum of debate and representing what's going on in this country
and in this world. That's why CNN needs to be strong." Actually,
that would be a good reason to get rid of CNN altogether. This country
would not be in the mess it is in, and Donald Trump would still be a
nose-in-the-window real estate huckster, had CNN, under Jeff Zucker's
regime, not dedicated itself to broadcasting his lies, unedited and
unending, during the entire 2015-2016 campaign. (You can read about that
here

and here

and here

and here
.)

The implication of Stelter's valentine to the company that fired him
is-as Malone pretends-that it's possible to represent the
Republican Party by balancing its construction of an alternative reality
defined by racism, sexism, conspiracy theorizing, etc. with the
perspective of the political world where relative sanity and no less
relative honesty prevail. But during the Trump administration, reporter
Daniel Dale had the exclusive purchase at the network on telling the
truth about Trump's lies, while the rest of the network was given over
to both-sidesing of them at best.

Now, thanks to Malone and his team's takeover of CNN (due in part to
his massive shareholdings in the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery),
we can see that management plans to push the network in Fox's
direction-minus, one presumes, the legally actionable content. One can
already see which way the wind is blowing the day following Stelter's
farewell, as Jake Tapper invited famed liar Dan Crenshaw on his program
to insist, "I still haven't seen any evidence that Trump was even
asked to give these documents back
." Tapper
not only failed to challenge this comically phony assertion, he also
proceeded to retweet this ridiculous claim
by Ivanka
Trump on behalf of her husband's execrable excuse for a book. (Don't
take my word for its awfulness. Take Dwight Garner's
.)
And can Tapper really believe, as is claimed in this tweet
, that
Trump has a "good shot at prevailing" in court about having stolen
secret documents? I wonder ...

A great deal of what drives mainstream coverage is a belief in the
apparently holy grail of "centrism" as a cure to our political ills,
as well as to the mainstream media's unpopularity. Thing is, the
"center" keeps shifting further and further away from reality as the
Republicans get crazier, more dishonest, and conspiratorially minded.
For its part, the public has not shifted, but a position that does not
align with the crazies' becomes labeled "liberal" instead of
merely "not insane," and positions considered far-right suddenly
become "centrist." This phenomenon is the product of many factors,
but the most significant of them are: (a) right-wing cable TV is a lot
more profitable than its counterparts, and (b) the right is
approximately a trillion times more effective at "working the refs
"
than the left is.

Here's a reality check on actual American political opinion at the
moment. According to a recent NBC news poll
:

* 57 percent of registered voters say that the investigations into
alleged wrongdoing by Trump should continue, while 40 percent say they
should stop.

* 58 percent of voters disapprove of the Supreme Court decision that
overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an
abortion, compared with 38 percent who approve.

* The Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act is more popular than
unpopular (42 percent call it a good idea, while 31 percent say it is a
bad idea).

* And most importantly, "threats to democracy" is now the most
important issue facing the country.

[link removed]

Now, let's take a few moments to examine the question of the role of
"the liberal media
"
in all of the above.

Example 1: One of the myriad questions raised by the publication of this
piece

by National Review editor Rich Lowry on the New York Times op-ed page
(headline: "Can You Tell Me What Would Happen if the FBI Were
Investigating a Democrat?") is "Has anybody at the New York Times
editorial staff ever heard of Hillary Clinton?" A second is "What
could possibly have been the point of publishing this?" It degrades
the reputation of the page for anyone who even cares about accuracy. And
it's not as if Lowry does not already appear everywhere in the media
all the time anyway. (Wikipedia informs me that "he regularly appears
on various cable shows and network Sunday shows, including NBC's Meet
the Press , ABC's This
Week , and FOX
News Sunday .") I
generally understand the calculations at work in these cases, but this
one is actually a shocker, coming as it does after the last editor of
the page lost his job after publishing Tom Cotton's neofascistic op-ed
during the Black Lives protests of 2020
.

Example 2: According to [social] science, "Conservative media and
influencers engag[e] in network amplification of politicized information
and misinformation significantly more than liberal media and
influencers." They also exhibit a "stronger tendency to retweet and
align their messages with conservative media than liberal influencers
did regarding liberal media." Moreover, "traditional media partially
[drives] partisan influencers' amplification," leading to an
asymmetry of right-wing partisan misinformation as compared to its
liberal counterpart. Again, no need to take my word for it. Rather, take
the word of these researchers
who
collected 358,707 Twitter accounts that followed 2,069,311 accounts and
detected nine distinct networks of traditional media and emerging
partisan influencers, and then examined their 3,540,629 tweets related
to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Donate to TAP's Midterm Tracker Travel Fund

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Your 100% tax deductible donation goes directly to our edit team to
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Thank you for your support!  

The news that HBO was purging over 200 Sesame Street episodes led me to
fond memories of watching something like 18 (don't check that)
episodes in a row with a child born in April 1998 about the adventures
of Slimey the Worm and his trip to the moon, sponsored by WASA (the
"Worm Aeronautics and Space Administration"), only to be rewarded
for my patience with its finale in which the great Tony Bennett sang
"Slimey to the Moon
."
Check out Season 29, Episode 3844 on April 8, 1999.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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