This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the latest effort by CNN to overcome a series of ratings-killing fumbles.
Playing middle linebacker is media critic Brian Stelter. His claim: Those who say CNN is miserable to view, biased, and scandal-ridden don’t watch it. Unsaid: Why would they?
Stelter spoke off the cuff at the end of his Sunday show. “They’re not watching CNN. They’re watching complaints about CNN on other channels that don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s the truth,” he said in a defense of his network.
Stelter’s commentary at the end of Sunday’s Reliable Sources:
“I want to end the hour with a final thought, and I’m going to go a little bit rogue here, so bear with me, OK? Jeff Zucker’s departure was shocking to the staff of CNN. But CNN was not built by just one man, not by only Ted Turner, and it was not led only by Jeff Zucker. CNN is so much bigger than any single individual. It is about teams and teams of people, thousands of individuals who make up CNN.
“This place is not perfect, it will never be perfect. We will always have flaws, we will always screw up, we will always have to run corrections, we will always have to keep working to make it better and better and better every single day. That is the goal.
“But the people who say we’re lacking journalism, that we’ve become an all-talk channel that we’ve run off, and we’re all opinions all the time, that Jeff Zucker led us astray. Those people aren’t watching CNN. They’re not watching CNN. They’re watching complaints about CNN on other channels that don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s the truth.
January Ratings: Fox News Hits 20 Years at Number 1, While CNN and MSNBC See Massive Drops From Last Year https://t.co/jd6IP22kSg
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) February 1, 2022
“Let’s put the map up on the screen of bureaus around the world. CNN has more bureaus around the world than almost any other news organization on the planet. That map covers the world, London and Moscow, Hong Kong and Beijing, and Nairobi and all the rest. That’s why one of the network’s slogans is, ‘Go There.’ On the day Jeff Zucker resigned, CNN aired more than 135 reporter hits, 135 reporters in the U.S. and around the world.
“I’m talking about dozens of live shots from international correspondents in just one day. On the day Jeff Zucker resigned, CNN published more than 215 stories on the website, nearly 90 original videos. That’s a hell of a lot of news. It’s a hell of a lot of journalism. Do some of the anchors say provocative things? Yes. Do some of those clips get played over and over again on other channels and mislead people about what CNN actually is? Yes.”
Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, explains our weekly pick: “The fact that CNN has a bunch of foreign bureaus does not mitigate the fact that CNN’s reputation has collapsed because its hours are dominated by anchors delivering left-wing opinion in the guise of providing ‘the truth.’ If anything, those foreign correspondents are being discredited not by accurate clips of CNN hosts played by conservative channels but by the very fact that anyone who tunes in to CNN is far more likely to see a CNN anchor ranting against conservatives or Donald Trump than they are to see a report from the Bangkok, Johannesburg, or Santiago bureaus.”
Rating: FOUR out of FIVE SCREAMS.
