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发帖数: 7106 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 USANews 讨论区 】
发信人: sinical (一江春水向东流), 信区: USANews
标 题: quora牛人关于cnn fake news的解读
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Thu Mar 23 14:01:39 2017, 美东)
Is it true that Fox News has a conservative bias and CNN has a liberal bias?
Actually, Fox News continues to play an important role in the devolution of
CNN from a respectable (if often boring) utilitarian news outlet to what it
is today, which is, frankly, a hot mess.
This is what happened. Fox News found that leaning hard to the right (while
promulgating the fiction that it was “fair and balanced”) while employing
a lot of presenters with outsized personalities and controversial “hot
takes” was a VERY successful business strategy. Fox started kicking CNN’s
ass in all the important ratings demos. CNN looked at what Fox was doing (
and at its own declining ratings) and, with Ted Turner out of the picture
after the AOL takeover, CNN executives (including the loathsome Eason Jordan
, but there were many other co-conspirators) decided it would be okay if CNN
’s on-camera presenters showed a bit more “personality.” (Prior to this
seismic change, CNN had pretty much hewed to Turner’s vision of a network
with “no stars, only news.”
It didn’t help that CNN’s only reliable prime-time viewer-getter was Larry
King, whose program was one-half gossip, one-half news and one-half
meandering anecdotes involving at least one mention of the Brooklyn Dodgers,
egg creams, or both. I once was standing next to then-CNN president Rick
Kaplan while he was joking with another executive about Larry King’s habit
of asking an intern to blot the grease off of King’s takeout Chinese-food
dinner. “Good,” Kaplan said. “We can’t afford for (King) to have one
more heart attack.” (Much laughter all around).
So the door was open for charismatic-presenters-with-hot-takes to come in
and compete with Fox News and in walks Anderson Cooper. Love him or hate him
, Anderson moved the network almost singlehandedly away from its old
position, which was that presenters should not bundle opinions and advocacy
into their newscasts. The fact that Anderson is well-meaning and a bright
guy does not for one moment change the fact that he helped push CNN down a
disastrous path where people who previously would not have abandoned their
resolutely neutral style started opining about things (Carol Costello, a
once fine anchor, is a standout example of this) and other people who had no
business at all being on any television news program, ever (like that idiot
Rick Sanchez) found a niche.
(I have often said that any network that would employ people like Rick
Sanchez and Nancy Grace has given up on wanting to be taken seriously, and
shouldn’t be).
When I was there, the only person who could regularly get away with
murdering journalism and stepping over the body and delivering 2 minutes and
30 seconds of pure commentary was Candy Crowley (for some reason, our
editors, known collectively as The Row, were afraid to challenge her).
These days, those journalism-killers are all over the network. So much so
that to see someone actually playing it down the middle, like the admirable
Jake Tapper, is almost shocking.
CNN couldn’t be Fox, and they couldn’t beat Fox, so they tried to
counterprogram against Fox using celebrity presenters. Those presenters are
the face of the network, thus they determine the way you perceive the
network. So even if a whole bunch of serious, apolitical professionals are
toiling belowdecks, what you actually see is Don Lemon getting into it with
someone on air and defending a liberal position and a liberal mindset (as he
did just last night, in fact, with Milwaukee’s Sheriff David Clarke Jr,
who gave Lemon an on-air beat-down and literally forced Lemon to tap out and
beg for a commercial break).
To be sure, Fox News loves to paint CNN as a liberal organ because that’s
just good marketing fodder and all’s fair in that kind of cutthroat
competition. So a good deal of the perception that CNN is liberal-leaning
comes from Fox’s shrewd marketing.
But CNN actually did abandon its core principles to try to compete against
the Fox juggernaut, and so now when I (very occasionally) happen to drop in
and watch CNN, I always see something that is tilted; askew; not quite right
. The anchors and their little teams (made up of like-minded producers) are
running the show; it is up to them and their individual consciences to
determine how fair and balanced the network is really going to be that day.
When your standards and practices become so elastic, it’s not long before
your shop exactly matches Hunter S. Thompson’s famous description of
television news:
“ (a) cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism
industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good
men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
These days, CNN’s oh-so-socially-conscious presenters believe in
predigesting the news for you and spitting it into your mouth like you were
a little baby bird, because they’re just that smart. Whether you think
those presenters are liberal dweebs or not, you should be offended that they
show you such contempt. They don’t think you’re capable of digesting your
own news.
As a viewer, the only surefire way to get the news without slant is to
sample multiple outlets (each with its own slant) and then average it all
together in your head. That’s a lot of work, though, boy. |
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