CNN as a "Non Partisan" News Gathering Organization

      There's a piece in Politico that CNN is having ratings problems.

      "In meetings, Feist has said that people should think of CNN as a premium channel for news, the way CNBC is a premium channel for finance. That thinking benefits CNN, because people never judge CNBC based on its ratings, which are very low. But it is also a radical admission for a network that, from its launch in 1980 until 10 years ago, was the leading cable news network on television — and one that the industry may therefore have a hard time taking seriously."

     Yet it likes to think of itself as occupying a higher moral ground than Fox and MSNBC who are lumped together as merely partisan as opposed to serious, hard news:

      "Feist and other network spokespeople dismiss the ratings comparison, arguing that CNN is not in the same category as MSNBC and Fox News. Where those two offer ideologically driven, partisan analysis, CNN is the only U.S. cable news organization committed to nonpartisan news-gathering, they say".

     “My comparison to MSNBC and Fox News is a very simple one,” Feist told POLITICO. “We don’t do what they do. We produce different products. I don’t think CNN should be in the same category as they are.”

     “As a news organization our ratings reflect the news environment much more so than the other networks,” said a spokesperson. “That said, we always want higher ratings, but not at the expense of non-partisan, quality journalism.”

       So is this true-is CNN a "real news organization" as opposed to partisan hackery? I suspect they are giving themselves too much credit. Yes there is value in objective, fact based news, but I'm not sure CNN earns that title simply by the vacuum effect. Just becasuse there's an absence of partisanship does this mean there's a presence of hard news? Again, I'm skeptical and I think this might be part of the story of why their ratings aren't better.

       One problem is that this is  the classic David Brooks ideology of Centrism. If I take the Center I must be right. Yet there's more to it than that. Sometimes taking the Center means nothing more than being lazy or misleading. For my own taste I don't mind CNN though it seems to me that their way of being Centrist or non-partisan is a little crude. Not all questions are just about splitting the difference.

      In the world of David Brooks' Centrism the right answer is just to declare both sides wrong and split the difference. We saw the major limits on this attitude during CNN's coverage of the Robert Zimmerman case. In the David Brooks' world you don't say Hitler's wrong to gas the Jews-that's unfairly partsian. Instead you give both sides equal time-those who say it's wrong and those who say we should gas all the Jews we can.

     I can just imagine Brooks wrting one of his tedious op-eds where he argues that while the liberals are right that 6 million Jews are just too many to gas but still they go too far in demanding that none are. Why not split the difference and accept say 1.5 million?

     Finally I must say that I object to the symmetry drawn between MSNBC and Fox. You examine the methods on Fox the fact that they think nothing of lies and distortions to sell their story. For those who doubt it they should check out David Brock's recent Fox Effect. Fox News is a propaganda machine pure and simple. There's no interest in fact based analysis as can be seen for example in their role in propgating the Birther myth.

    MSNBC is clearly partisan in that it's liberal and favors the Democrats but there also is a recognition of basic minimum standards of accuracy and fact checking.  They may have a point of view but they don't as a mattter of general practice just make things up. I would love to see MSNBC put up against the allegedly more objective and fact based CNN to see whose percentage of accurate stories is higher. I would not be shocked at all if MSNBC  wins.