Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
No, but if solely or almost entirely focused on ratings, I would look at that night as an example of what I should do more often.
The argument the public doesn't like libertarian news of a variety John Malone and Zaslav ostensibly wanted at CNN is correct, but that observation is misplaced in any analysis of why Licht failed.
Licht never sought to offer libertarian news, and for good reason. Nobody would want to see that. The majority of viewing audiences who'll tune in to cable news regularly are siloed. They want a slant, and libertarian views frustrate these sorts of people more than do their respective opponents. If one seeks the binary (My Tribe vs. Other), he doesn't want to hear news from a perspective critical of that black and white thinking. His opponent at least reinforces the view that there's a battle for the culture/country/whatever comprised of two warring camps. Those who question the legitimacy of that game challenge his entire view of how the world operates.
I think the clear takeaway from the postmortems on Licht is that he sullied the brand and misused Trump. Like it or not, for some reason, Trump remains compelling, getting more eyeballs than anybody else in the race (and arguably on the planet). Zucker played this for ratings by going to war with Trump. This acquired both ratings and gravitas. The yeomen in the trenches at CNN knew they were enabling and platforming a nutball for ratings, but they could abide it on the basis they were against him. Licht platformed Trump in a manner less confrontational and in parts positive (audience stacked with Trump friendly sorts). This risked reputational damage and angered the foot soldiers of the network who are almost entirely anti-Trump.
Licht's problem isn't that he wasn't going to make money for CNN. Trump's ratings show he was on to something. The problem was the culture of the place is incompatible with that level of cynical ratings-chasing. The other problem is that because of his unique nature, one cannot be agnostic on Trump. His attraction is the extreme polarization he creates, without which he wouldn't have succeeded as he has in politics. People like us can separate a man from his policies and look at the pluses and minuses (Immigration: Disaster; Tariffs: Stupid and Counterproductive; Expansion of Standard Deduction: Huge Help to the Working Class Renter Segment of Society, etc.). The average audience member cannot do this and does not want to do this. They are for him or against him and that's that. Licht tried to cover Trump as a normal candidate, and that Just Does Not Work.
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If you are going to write a long post about why Licht failed, you owe it to yourself and any reader to first read the article in The Atlantic that got him fired.
Notwithstanding that, you now accept that Licht got fired because his programming strategies did not work. Not that this contradicts your earlier theories about how he got fired because of lib employee whining, or that the mainstream media oppressively and hegemonically covers the news in an effort to defeat populism. So I'm glad you have moved on from that nonsense.
I would put the last thing you said differently. There is a large core of conservatives who want the news delivered from a conservative slant. They watch FOX News, which knows (we know from the Dominion case) that it has to tell them what they want to hear even when it's nonsense, because otherwise they may go somewhere else like OAN or Tucker's Twitterfest. There is a small core of lefties who want something like FOX News for lefties. This market is much smaller and has not been able to sustain anything like FOX News on the left -- witness the failure of Air America, or the many obvious differences between FOX News and MSNBC, which has some programming for these folks. And then there is a mainstream crowd, that wants the news, relatively straight. These people are not as engaged as the FOX listeners, and they are more likely to watch CNN when something like a hurricane or an impeachment or a war is happening.
Licht said, essentially, let's try to pick up more of an audience by trying to speak to moderate Republicans more. The problem is, that isn't an audience. He was either trying to get people to switch from FOX News, or to get people who aren't his audience more engaged. The FOX News viewers aren't going to switch to CNN, and there isn't an untapped crowd of libertarians or moderate Republicans out there. The failure here was to assume that there was a potential audience with views that more matched CNN's new billionaire owner. It is common for billionaires to make this sort of mistake, for obvious reasons. There is some pathos in watching a guy like Licht, who is not a billionaire, stake and lose his professional reputation trying to please a billionaire boss, but there is even more pathos in watching people below him at CNN lose their jobs because Licht was trying to square a circle, or in watching CNN give a platform for Trump in the process.
