The Fallacy of CNN

While the reality of the elections, and of other political stories in today’s partisan cable news probably lay somewhere in the middle, CNN tried but failed to articulate this reality. As has become too often the problem with today’s media, “balanced” coverage is being interpreted not as unpartisan news reported, but rather as bipartisan news reporting. Conventional wisdom has grown to accept MSNBC as representative of the left and Fox News as the platform of the right. But CNN’s role in this cable news mess is much less clear. While many have characterized them as the “moderates”, this is a completely misinformed characterization. CNN, in trying to find the “middle ground”, has chosen to use the political keyword of “bipartisan”, displaying what they see as objectivity by giving each side equal representation. Ignoring the possibility that equal exposure may not necessarily be representative of national opinion, the thing that CNN is missing is nonpartisan information. Rather than giving viewers the news in a manner freed from the party talking points that comprise MSNBC and Fox News’s coverage, CNN has simply chosen to give viewers what amounts to a sampling of talking points from both sides. Going back to the discussion of the 2010 midterm elections, CNN’s coverage was in essence a highlight show of what was being broadcast on the other two cable news networks. Anderson Cooper, on the same night that Fox was highlighting the FreedomWorks memo calling (again) for a health care repeal, covered that same “story”, justifying their position in the “middle” by immediately moving on to coverage of the “Democratic response” (Anderson Cooper 360, November 5, 2010).
This tendency of CNN to claim that the “Crossfire” approach of involving both sides of the aisle does indeed serve as a form of objective reporting is exactly the point made famously by Jon Stewart and others that led to the eventual cancellation of the show with that exact title, Crossfire. Still, CNN did nothing to change the content of their broadcasts, essentially adding a moderator in the form of an Anderson Cooper or a Wolf Blitzer to moderate the same argument between the same partisan pundits (in fact, Paul Begala of Crossfire was the man responsible for this “Democratic response” described earlier). The partisan nature of MSNBC and Fox News aside, cable news is dangerously misinterpreting bipartisan coverage as nonpartisan coverage, a mistake that could mean the end of truly objective television news reporting.