The press has a weakness for perennial stories, but while some are benign—presidential pardon for Thanksgiving turkey, overdue medal for wartime hero—others are not so benign and deeply irritating as well. One instructive example is when a well-known media property changes hands: There is always the public pledge that the new owner won’t interfere—wouldn’t even dream of interfering—with the editorial “independence” of the aforementioned media property.
The last major demonstration of this time-honored ritual was when Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos bought the ailing Washington Post. It was not the survival of the Post that seemed to matter to its editorial staff; it was the newsroom’s “independence” from its owner’s points of view.
This is partly a consequence of the late-20th-century belief, especially strong among journalists, that the practice of journalism is a form of civic sacrament and that journalists are members of a kind of holy order: sacrosanct, above the law, safely insulated from the vagaries of commerce. But it is also a matter of partisan politics. And a case in point is the recent assurance by the chief executive of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, that if the proposed merger of his company with Time Warner is approved, the editorial “independence” of CNN, a Time Warner subsidiary, will be guaranteed.
Stephenson was especially groveling in his email statement: “CNN is an American symbol of independent journalism,” he declared. “We must protect the creative talent. . . . The talent must fundamentally believe they will be afforded the same creative license [after the merger] they have today.”
Of course, this might be part of the price a cynical capitalist pays to get the deal done, which is by no means assured. Or Stephenson might actually believe (as proprietors are often told) that he has no business shaping the product he owns. In any event, The Scrapbook’s view is that, whatever the truth behind the pious sentiments, this is all especially rich coming from the Cable News Network, which, since its inception in 1980, has been a faithful exponent of the left-liberal politics largely standard in the mainstream media.
Stephenson’s email, after all, was written in response to concerns expressed by Tom Johnson, CNN’s president during 1990-2001, who spent the first decade of his working life in the employ of Lyndon Johnson. It was sent along as well to CNN’s founder-owner Ted Turner, who in his heyday not only directed the substance and character of CNN’s content but gave it a peculiarly distasteful flavor. At the height of the Cold War, CNN was one of a handful of media institutions that saw no particular distinction between the United States and the Soviet Union—and faithfully reflected the Soviet perspective.
Has Randall Stephenson ever heard of Vladimir Posner, the Kremlin propagandist who was one of Turner’s preeminent talking heads? And who can forget Turner’s contribution to world peace, the Goodwill Games, broadcast by CNN from Moscow?
It is worth noting that Tom Johnson’s concerns about CNN’s editorial “independence” were first expressed in a round-robin email sent to the editor of the Washington Post, the publisher of the New York Times, the publisher of Politico, ex-NBC news reader Tom Brokaw, and other guardians of media orthodoxy. Accordingly, Randall Stephenson is not likely to jeopardize any dinner invitations by breaking ranks. Hypocrisy, as they say, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. But let’s not confuse CNN’s editorial “independence” with anything like integrity or journalistic honor.
