CNN v. Fox
rantingprofs.com
By Cori Dauber
I watched the new president of CNN's domestic operations on Charlie Rose last night, and he was making all the right noises about giving the audience hard information to let people "drill down" into the story, find out things they didn't know by the time they turned on CNN. (Of course, he also swore up and down, despite the appearance of this story in yesterday's Times that he didn't view his job as competing against Fox.
Yeah, sure.)
Yet here's what's in the Times article.
One of Mr. Klein's mantras - a version of the same one he invoked when announcing in January that he intended to cancel the afternoon shout-fest "Crossfire" - is that the network's prime-time programs should spend less time reporting the news of the day and more time spinning out what he hopes are emotionally gripping, character-driven narratives pegged to recent events.
Great. Imagine a news world where every story is covered the way NBC covers Olympic events. He's basically telling reporters to go forth and discover every story's inner soap opera. For every athlete, after all, there must be a disabled aunt who worked two jobs to pay for their training in between driving them back and forth and inspired them along the way.
On Charlie Rose (and, by the way, I've never seen a man so powerful behave in such a sycophantic fashion. You would have thought he was an Oscar-nominated actor) he said that the greats of the business were themselves on the air because they basically invented television news -- they had no model. Now TV reporters are all the same because they all come up from local news and they imitate the same people. So he's telling CNN's correspondents to "be themselves," put their personalities into their reporting -- like those original giants.
Not quite what's happening.
But he has also sought to take a page from the playbook of local television news and encourage some reporters to put more of their personalities in their reports. It is not insignificant that he is being advised in this effort by Joel Cheatwood, a former news executive in Miami and Chicago who is well known for using loud sound effects to amplify crime stories and for the failed effort to make Jerry Springer a commentator in Chicago in the late 1990's.
But that wouldn't have sounded very appealing to Charlie Rose's high brow audience, would it?
I love that their example is Rick Sanchez getting himself shocked, the very segment Jon Stewart found so easy to mock he had to play it twice -- once in slow motion.
They don't want to be a "liberal Fox" (no comment) so they're keeping their hosts. Larry King was just signed to another contract renewal. That alone should put his judgment into question.
He described Fox as the network for "angry white men." Given what else he said, I'm sure this isn't a case where he doesn't understand the competition. I think he was trying to be as attractive and flattering to Charlie Rose's audience (which is likely not, for the most part, Fox's) as possible, so he played to their stereotype of who and what Fox is.
But the bottom line is this: he's not a news guy, not a journalist, whatever his background. He's a business guy with a product to sell and market, and that means to spin -- it just so happens his product is the news.
Oh, one last thing: his position on bloggers? They're an influence, and you'd better read and understand them, see what the trends are. They don't think their viewers have time to read them, hence their new segments on what's going on in the blogosphere. |
