CNN, like most cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you’ll most consistently find is a sort of generic drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off. On any given day you’ll find a rotating parade of lazy “view from nowhere” journalism that doesn’t inform so much as it tries to present a sanitized, corporate-friendly, apolitical platter of feckless mush.
Under Time Warner CEO David Zaslav the problem has become particularly dire. Zaslav is the sort of fail-upward media brunchlord that has no real new ideas for media. His relationship with all Time Warner properties in the wake of the disastrous AT&T and Discovery mergers has been purely extractive. He’s obsessed with tax cuts and mindless consolidation, not product quality or the public interest.
So like most Time Warner properties (see: HBO), CNN quality has suffered. The channel routinely throws fat six figure contracts at some of the least remarkable thinkers in media. Like many modern major outlets, CNN’s “both sides” approach to journalism loses the truth in an illusory quest for fake objectivity (Academics like NYU’s Jay Rosen or UPenn’s Viktor Pickard have discussed this all at length for years).
Outlets like CNN, financially disincentivized from real introspection, have responded to this sort of criticism poorly. Instead of producing more courageous journalism, they’ve repeatedly doubled down on bad ideas. Like this week, when CNN announced it would soon be erecting a new paywall. Under CNN’s new plan, the news outlet will begin asking some readers to pay $3.99 a month to access articles:
“Starting today, we are asking users in the United States to pay a small recurring fee for unlimited access to CNN.com’s world-class articles,” Alex MacCallum, CNN’s executive vice president of digital products and services, wrote in a memo outlining the plan.
The problem is that most of what CNN offers isn’t anything close to what you’d call “world class” journalism, insight, or analysis. Like many outlets CNN can accomplish decent journalism. But the lion’s share of the company’s content feels like it’s been pumped out of a dystopian nightmare built by dullards, peppered with unlimited advertisements for new pharmaceuticals and their assorted side effects.
We’ve discussed repeatedly how erecting a paywall may feel like the right idea for cash-strapped outlets, but it’s generally not conducive to journalism or democracy. And if an outlet is going to paywall, it needs to be delivering exceptional content you can’t really get anywhere else. That’s not really the case with CNN, which has been the poster child for terrible U.S. election season political journalism.
You can’t just take the charmless garbage produced by the highly consolidated engagement and infotainment economy and slap a paywall on it to increase its value. That’s simply not how any of this works.
Over the last four months in particular, we’ve seen growing animosity at the terrible, feckless election season coverage of major outlets, be it the New York Times, Axios, Politico, or CNN. Most major outlets have demonstrated the harms of letting media consolidate into the hands of wealthy brunchlords, who seem to enjoy normalizing and “sanewashing” a rising and radical authoritarian threat.
The idea that paywalls and price hikes are the answer to the problem of sagging quality and industry consolidation suggests executives still can’t really see why their outlets’ reputations are in the toilet. Which is why they’ll continue to be disrupted by direct-to-consumer newsletter authors and smaller independent media outlets with a healthy fixation on their audience and the actual truth.