Here's the real reason CNN's Donald Trump disaster was inevitable
Hint: It has something to do with Stephen Colbert.
The early verdicts on Donald Trump’s CNN town hall are in, and they’re about what you’d expect:
Chris Licht? Who is Chris Licht?
Why, he’s the boss man at CNN of course, brought in last year after a wave of mergers and firings to right a faltering ship. He has attracted a lot of attention from liberals for proclaiming a mission of steering the network back to the middle after anti-Trump commentary dominated its broadcasts during that disastrous presidency.
But that isn’t what is interesting about him.
Chris Licht, a veteran television producer who helped create “Morning Joe” at MSNBC and later successfully retooled morning and late-night programming at CBS, is set to be the next leader of CNN, according to three people with direct knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Licht, 50, who is currently the executive producer of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” is poised to succeed Jeff Zucker, the CNN president whose nine-year tenure abruptly ended this month when he resigned over an undisclosed romantic relationship with a colleague.
That’s right. The guy who runs America’s oldest cable news network? His last job was running a late night comedy show.
To be fair, he came to that comedy show from a career in cable news. It’s not like he’s a newbie in the field.
Still: Don’t you think it’s interesting that the skill sets to run a comedy show and to run a news network roughly interchangeable?
I’ve known a few newspaper editors. None of them came to the job from running a dunk tank at a carnival.
Here it’s time to repeat and slightly rephrase myself:
If you want to understand the world, you should read the news.
If you want to be entertained by the news, watch it on TV.
Or as I said tonight on Twitter:
TV news is built to make you feel things. Like social media, it's algorithm is designed to produce "engagement" not enrichment, and engagement is driven by extreme feelings. Of course CNN put Trump on.
Chris Licht’s job isn’t to inform you or make the world safe for democracy. It’s to entertain the biggest audience possible.
Mission accomplished, I guess, as far as the Trump town hall is concerned.
What to do about our CNN problem? Don't watch CNN.
In fact, maybe don't watch TV news at all.
To be fair, he's chairman and CEO, which doesn't really require any skills other than golden parachuting.
Spot on, but nearly impossible to accomplish. We are visual beings. And we are lazy. TV produces motion, and our fixed gaze along with our ears can passively take it all in. When we read, we actually have to move our eyeballs, create something akin to an inner monolog, and—call me a cockeyed optimist—hopefully, an inner dialog as well.
There's also the "dancing flames of a burning fire effect". Something hypnotizing about it. I think color TV likely kicked this up an electron shell level of energy, or three.