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[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I think your description of who gets hired into media companies is wrong. But even if it were right, it fails to account for the fact that the entry-level inmates are not running the asylum, though much of what you say above tacitly acknowledges that. For example, your point about "silos" shows the media coverage is shaped by the way that different outlets make business decisions about how to position themselves. Back in the day, when the means of publication (printing presses, television licenses) were expensive, there were few outlets and they generally tried to serve mass markets. The means of production have gotten much cheaper, outlets have proliferated, and many of them compete by targeting categories of consumers. Fox and MSNBC have done that, and so did CNN under Licht. All of this means there are a variety of media outlets doing different things, not a hegemony with one voice dictated by progressive hires from schools you don't like.

Licht's tenure at CNN illustrates this. He got the job because a rich libertarian billionaire bought CNN and wanted CNN to broadcast stuff that better fit his rich libertarian views. (This is a poor market move, in that rich libertarians are a vanishingly small share of the market for views, but a common move by media companies, which are often bought by rich people.) Licht fired a bunch of people with left-of-center views, which of course served pour encourager les autres, and CNN's coverage has noticeably changed. You completely ignore the facts that people got fired and coverage changed, which completely disproves your point. Licht got canned not because anyone was throwing a "hissy fit," but because he didn't know what he was doing and it wasn't working. This article in The Atlantic is the definitive account.

When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.

One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than “save journalism.” But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.

You seem think that if CNN's ratings had been up, Licht would have been fired anyway. I guess you can believe that if you want to, but that's not how the world works.

It appears that if ratings, rather than upsetting the culture of the network, were the primary basis for his firing, it was a rather curious termination:

“CNN's controversial town hall with former President Donald Trump drew 3.3 million viewers Wednesday night, making CNN the most-watched cable news network of the evening, according to final ratings from Nielsen. Why it matters: The event delivered a much-needed ratings boost for CNN, though at a cost.”

https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/cnn...ll-tv-ratings#