Anderson Cooper Asks Viewers to Understand CNN Actually Covers News Now

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, May 12, 2023

 

I don’t know what you thought about the CNN Town Hall with Donald Trump the other night, but I can tell you this much: CNN’s viewers didn’t care for it, if Anderson Cooper’s show last night was anything to go by.

 

Coop had to get up there last night and do something that I cannot quite describe as “damage control,” more like a stern lecture. I really advise you to click and watch the entire thing — the delivery is half the fun, for conservatives at least — but the most illustrative excerpt is this:

 

Now many of you think CNN shouldn’t have given [Trump] any platform to speak. And I understand the anger about that, giving him the audience, the time. I get that. But this is what I also get. The man you were so disturbed to hear from last night, that man is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president. And according to polling, no other Republican is even close. That man you were so upset to hear from last night, he may be president of the United States in less than two years. And that audience that upset you, that’s a sampling of about half the country. They are your family members, your neighbors, and they are voting. And many said they’re voting for him.

 

Now maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office. Maybe you’ve been enjoying not hearing from him thinking it can’t happen again. Some investigation is going to stop him. Well, it hasn’t so far. So if last night showed anything, it showed it can happen again. It is happening again. He hasn’t changed, and he is running hard.

 

“That audience that upset you? That’s a sampling of about half the country.” Left unstated by Cooper, but obviously implied: It ain’t our half of the country. Cooper sums up by saying viewers “have every right to be outraged today, and angry, and never watch this network again,” which takes the self-flagellation delightfully too far (again: viewed from a detached perspective, this is elite-level cringe humor). But although it would be easy to dismiss his monologue as mere comedy — he really does deliver it with the astringently seriocomic sobriety of a man who has just mistakenly quaffed a vinegar martini — his arguments are reasonable enough, taken on their own.

 

They are less reasonable when taken in the context of CNN’s conduct during the Trump era. This was the network that famously would run 20 minutes of an empty podium with chyrons like “WAITING FOR TRUMP PLANE BEFORE PATRIOTIC RALLY BEGINS” back when Trump was thought merely to be a devastating joke at the GOP’s expense. (He still is, but in different ways than initially anticipated.) I would be more inclined to forgive the media for its errors during the 2016 cycle had they not immediately decided to “atone” for them by turning Russiagate into a four-year-long conspiracy theory every bit as damaging to America’s civic fabric as QAnon, if not moreso. (Nobody in the mainstream media tried to legitimize QAnon to the masses, after all. Guess who led the charge when it came to Russiagate on the TV news side, though? You guessed it: CNN.)

 

Cooper’s agonistes are amusing enough. I credit his personal sincerity, at least. But the real insight to be gleaned from this monologue is the immense difficulty CNN is having digging out of the hole it shoveled itself down into by devolving into a rotely partisan carousel of anti-Trump programming during the “Resistance.” Not only was CNN’s political angle as predictable as a medieval catapult trajectory in that era, it was vulgarly obvious and (fatally) simply boring. All the cable-news networks made fateful decisions in response to Trump and his boozily toxic effect upon ratings during 2015-2021. As easy as it is to note that CNN destroyed its “middle-of-the-road” brand by leaning hard into Jeff Zucker–style “Resistance” schtick, we’d do well to note that Fox News is currently paying a piper who sang quite differently to the tune of $787 million for bills that may only have come due in 2023, but arguably were incurred as far back as 2015.

 

CNN, however, is in a uniquely difficult situation as a network that gave up its brand once (“international news, establishment centrism”) and now is faced with having to do it again. Their viewership has shrunken so small that, in chasing a larger and more moderate audience, they are experiencing the pain of alienating the few viewers they still have left — with absolutely no promise whatsoever that their play for greater relevance will pay off. (The lukewarm ratings, which drew roughly the same amount of eyeballs as a good night of Tucker Carlson’s show pre-cancellation, suggest there is work yet to do.) MSNBC is a perennial punching bag in the cable-news wars, but it should also be noted that the network has kept a relatively steady identity for years and is currently suffering far less internal turmoil for it.

 

CNN has to grapple with its own journalistic sins in turn with its unenviable market position. It will be fascinating to see the script of this play written in front of our eyes as they fumble for a new identity on the fly, in the era of Trump Reborn. I only hope it turns out to be a comedy — perhaps a light farce — instead of the King Lear–style tragedy they helped turn it into the last time around.