The top echelons of the American media were back in the spotlight this week after CNN abandoned the recently launched streaming service this week and the New York Times appointed a prominent Bostonian to lead it.
CNN + will close on April 30, about a month after it launched with an investment of $ 300 million. The new owner of the network, Warner Bros. Discovery – the $ 43 billion merger product itself between AT&T and Discovery Network – has decided that a subscription-based streaming service is not feasible. Only 100,000 users have registered.
CNN’s new chairman and chief executive, Chris Licht, said the decision to dump CNN + was the product of a uniquely bad situation.
“We have to admit what happened, even though it is not the result of what we did,” Licht told staff at a town hall meeting.
The postponement of the service left high-ranking officials, including Fox News veteran Chris Wallace and Casey Hunt, a former NBC News and MSNBC veteran. This is the end of a project that encouraged leading CNN reporters to less news-focused tariffs such as the Jake Tapper Book Club and Anderson Cooper’s Parental Guide.
At a company meeting hosted by Oprah Winfrey at Warner Bros. in Burbank, California last week, David Zaslav, CEO and president of CNN’s corporate mother, said he wanted CNN to focus on the facts and break away from cable … the news industry, monopolized by “advocacy networks”.
“If we get that, we can have a civilized society,” Zaslav said. “Even without him, if everything turns into advocacy, we do not have a civilized society.
Board member John Malone also spoke on media bias.
“I’d like to see CNN go back to the kind of journalism it started with and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” Malone told CNBC in November.
CNN is not alone in signaling that it is abandoning a series of reports that may have taken place in an attempt to oppose Fox News, the far more profitable right-wing known for its intense public loyalty.
Attention to the penetration of opinion in the news was also on the menu of the New York Times, although not so open, given the gift he would present to the enemies of the newspaper.
This week, the controlling Sulzberger family chose Joe Kang, a former correspondent in China, as the new executive editor.
Outgoing executive editor Dean Bucket left with his successor, Joe Kahn, in the New York Times newsroom last year. Photo: Damon Winter / AP
Although leading editors felt that some officials had ignored restrictions on which opinions were appropriate for publication, they left the paper, and the publisher, AG Sulzberger, said he believed in “the principle of openness to a number of opinions.”
This week, a Times insider told New York magazine: “It makes sense – and it makes a lot of people very happy – that [Kahn] is much less inclined to indulge in the complaints and constant cries of activism, and that he is a man who has expressed little patience for the outbreaks of the cultural war in the newsroom, which have been so distracting for us lately. ”
Two weeks ago, the newspaper’s outgoing executive editor, Dean Bucket, published a “reset” in the newspaper and the reporters ‘approach to Twitter, which had long been thought to have undue influence on some aspects of the Times’ editorial approach.
“We are not ordering anyone not to be on Twitter,” Bucket said. “But we also just want to help people modulate it.”
Like many news organizations, the Times is trying to pave the way between those who would see anti-democratic excesses on the right as a reason to oppose the left with more activism and those who say news organizations should be essentially non-political.
“We will not be tempted to become ‘opposition,'” Sulzberger said in 2018. “And they will not applaud us to become ‘opposition.’
Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, said the collapse of political discourse has created a problem for all institutions.
“They all have strategies and those strategies are falling out of favor, so they are changing them,” he said. “No one really knows what to do, but there are different ways to falsify it.”
For the Times, Rosen said, the carefully worded statements of Cannes and others really say: “There is pressure to become more liberal and we will not do that.”
He said: “They think their critics and key readers want them to be pro-Joe Biden and ignore all the flaws they have. They say they will not be intimidated by the right wing or greeted by the left wing to do what they want. “
In February, the Times launched a new advertising campaign: Independent Journalism for Independent Living. For Rosen, this was a carefully calibrated articulation of a shift that could not be fully articulated.
“The whole issue is shrouded in a bow of independence,” he said. “This is the language they use to announce change without articulating any need for change.”
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