Last week Campbell Brown announced she was leaving her 8pm slot on CNN because of poor ratings. Brown acknowledged to the media that she could have claimed she was leaving to spend more time with her family or for personal reasons, but instead she admitted that ratings were the primary driver of her decision.
“I have never had much tolerance for others’ spin, so I can’t imagine trying to stomach my own,” she said. “The simple fact is that not enough people want to watch my program, and I owe it to myself and to CNN to get out of the way so that CNN can try something else.”
She’s right.
In the 8pm hour, Brown’s program runs a distant fourth place behind Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Nancy Grace on HLN.
But what could CNN do that might actually cause a breakthrough?
Their constant theme of “nonpartisan news coverage” has only helped to destroy the size of their audience. People want something exciting, controversial or interactive.
Fareed Zakaria GPS ain’t it.
Please CNN, don’t just pick another anonymous anchor and drop them into that timeslot. Use this opportunity to take a hard look at your schedule and figure out how you went from being the top name in cable news to an afterthought.
Someone, somewhere along the line has convinced your network that viewers want long-form human interest stories about “real people” and their struggles. If you want to do that stuff in the context of a weekly newsmagazine, that’s one thing and it would be fine that way.
Instead, CNN has softened up their “hard news” with so much heartland goop that it’s nearly impossible to sit through. Cut to a reporter in a dumpy little Nebraska town trying as hard as she can to make the appropriate sad face while talking to a local who lost his job when the last independent hardware store in the county was forced to close. ENOUGH ALREADY!
That’s probably the biggest reason I almost never watch the network any more, unless there’s some breaking news that benefits from live television coverage.
Look, I know there has been no shortage of free advice on fixing CNN offered by armchair network programmers. Politico.com recently took a crack at collecting the thoughts of a handful of so-called media experts. Daniel McCarthy of the American Conservative offered up his own thoughts.
In March, Jay Rosen of NYU actually suggested a whole new prime time lineup for the network that involves shedding Larry King and Anderson Cooper in favor of the following mess…
- 7 pm: Leave John King in prime time and rename his show Politics is Broken. It should be an outside-in show. Make it entirely about bringing into the conversation dominated by Beltway culture and Big Media people who are outsiders to Beltway culture and Big Media and who think the system is broken. No Bill Bennett, no Gloria Borger, no “Democratic strategists,” no Tucker Carlson. Do it in the name of balance. But in this case voices from the sphere of deviance balance the Washington consensus.
- 8 pm: Thunder on the Right. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational liberal that mostly covers the conservative movement and Republican coalition… and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are right leaning. The television equivalent of the reporting Dave Wiegel does.
- 9 pm: Left Brained. Flip it. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational conservative that mostly covers liberal thought and the tensions in the Democratic party…. and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are left leaning.
- 10 pm: Fact Check An accountability show with major crowdsourcing elements to find the dissemblers and cheaters. The week’s most outrageous lies, gimme-a-break distortions and significant misstatements with no requirement whatsoever to make it come out equal between the two parties on any given day, week, month, season, year or era. CNN’s answer to Jon Stewart.
- 11 pm.: Liberty or Death: World’s first news program from a libertarian perspective, with all the unpredictability and mix-it-up moxie that libertarians at their best provide. Co-produced with Reason magazine.
The problem with Rosen’s suggested line-up is that it involves creating a massive number of brand new shows that are ultimately very poor fits for each other. It’s a total jumble.
In television, particularly cable news, you need to offer viewers a line-up that has a decent flow. That’s why Fox News is all talking head conservatives and MSNBC is all talking head liberals.
But CNN doesn’t want to be one or the other, they want to chart a middle course.
And that’s fine.
However, the programming you offer has to be INTERESTING!
Here’s how you could actually fix CNN: Go back 10 years, look at what was working, and then steal from yourselves!
First off, bring back CNN’s old program Talk Back Live, and instead of airing it at 3pm, put it in prime time. It would be a great option to fill the 8pm slot left blank by Brown’s departure.
For those who don’t remember, Talk Back Live was basically a massive public forum. They would bring on guests, they had a live studio audience and they took viewer feedback in the form of email, FAXs, telephone calls and so on.
The original TBL would cover a mixture of topics from politics to pop culture and everything in between. The program originally aired from 1994 to 2003, and was canned not for bad ratings… but because the network needed to expand regular news coverage of the war in Iraq.
The advances in technology over the last seven years would make TBL even more powerful. They could fully integrate CNN’s website, plus Twitter and Facebook into the show. Work in live audience polls and trivia to make the show hyper-interactive.
It’s compelling television and people would watch and create a lot of buzz trying to get their emails or tweets read live on air. In that way it becomes a great promotional vehicle for CNN’s digital brands.
Next, bring back Crossfire and Inside Politics in the afternoon programming block they once occupied. Both shows could then rebroadcast at the fringes of the prime time schedule.
Crossfire was a debate show that aired from 1982 to 2005. It would generally include one panelist “from the right” and one “from the left” — in later years that usually meant some combination of Paul Begala, James Carville, Robert Novak and Tucker Carlson. And then one or two guests.
The show was driven off the air in 2005, taking heavy criticism from the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart of all people. Stewart charged that the program was a screaming match and not a real forum for ideas.
While it may not have been perfect, Crossfire was a generally balanced program. The hosts from either side were articulate and they argued their points reasonably well against each other. Right now, no program really exists like that in cable news.
What you have today is Bill O’Reilly bringing on a series of weak-kneed liberals and pounding them like a punching bag for 10 minutes. Or Olbermann/Maddow doing the same to their conservative guests.
If things get out of hand, O’Reilly or Olbermann can just cut off the microphone on their guests and finish making their own point.
To use a sports analogy, these current shows are the equivalent of watching a juggernaut team playing a home game against a hand picked opponent.
You know the score before anyone even touches the ball.
In contrast, Crossfire was a play-off game on neutral territory. Both teams were well represented and would fight it out… often to an inconclusive result. And even if nothing was really decided and everyone left the room holding the same opinion they came in with, it was still a whole lot more fun to watch that game than a staged blow-out.
Inside Politics was exactly what it’s name suggested. A program exclusively and entirely devoted to covering politics as news. Not really a debate program, the show was at its very best during election season when there was a lot going on.
I remember watching it daily during the 1996 and 2000 Presidential primary seasons. Judy Woodruff would interview candidates and surrogates, decipher polls and examine speeches. Informative and fun to watch, it was the coverage of politics as a contact sport.
After bringing back Inside Politics, there are a number of other ways it which it might also make sense to go back in time and steal from yourself.
At one point CNN offered a show called Moneyline at 7pm, hosted by Lou Dobbs. Over time, the show evolved into a personality-driven show called Lou Dobbs Tonight and the business content of it largely faded.
With the economy such a hot topic at the moment, why not bring back a nightly hour-long business program? Neil Cavuto has done it for a while on Fox News with great success.
On the weekends it would make a lot of sense to rebuild the Capital Gang. Essentially a more distinguished version of Crossfire, it was show that I rarely missed in my early days of cable news consumption.
Evans and Novak, though both men have passed on, might also be worthy of revival under a new name.
Also, if you do nothing else, please return to using your old election night music. The more recent musical selections have lacked that historic punch.
Looking back 10 or 15 years, the election theme music was horn heavy and sounded serious and exciting. (See the small video below for an example of what I’m talking about.)
Right now CNN is a network without an identity.
They’ve tried to cast themselves as the political network, but if you flip on the station you’re just as likely to see coverage of a campaign as you are a story about a woman caught in a flood or the mysterious death of a B-list celebrity.
How about a serious technology show on the weekends?
Find someone like Leo Laporte and give him an hour to build something people would actually want to watch. Or for a tech-business twist, consider turning over a couple of hours to Jason Calacanis. He’s entertaining, educational and occassionally controversial… and he’s proven he often draw bigger “ratings” with his online programs than you guys can get to watch your standard Saturday afternoon fare.
Get just a little bit creative, CNN. Most of the work is already done for you, just visit your own archives to get the ball rolling.
I would watch Crossfire. I would watch Inside Politics. And heck, I’d probably watch Talk Back Live too.
Stop looking around for the next Glenn Beck or the next Anderson Cooper. You guys had a winning formula for cable news and you threw it away.
Go pick it out of the trash!
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