When nations erupt in war, we need hard facts, not hot takes.
Yet anyone who turned to CNN during the first evenings of the Russian offensive in Ukraine found personalities far more used to opining from a liberal point of view than anchoring reporting. The point of view was different, of course, but the same also was true on Fox News.
And if you got your news from Twitter, it was worse yet. You read tweet after tweet trying to impose some domestic policy grievance or other homegrown agenda on an international crisis where the actors see the world in an entirely different way.
There's nothing wrong with informed opinion. But, especially given recent events, we're still glad to see that the new head of CNN, Chris Licht, has said he plans to return the Cable News Network to, well, actual hard news. As distinct, say, from a Cuomo interviewing a Cuomo or a spluttering anchor pumping themselves up with first-person outrage and defending a position or the policies of a particular administration, as if they were a paid consultant.
Instead, Licht, bring on the ethical reporters on the rooftops with local sources and bird's-eye views of events on the ground. Bring on the anchor who knows the right questions to ask and how to separate the trivial from the critical. Think long term. Embrace the mission. Take a lesson, perhaps, from the work of Peter Jennings on ABC News on Sept 11, 2001.
With an assist from Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump is partly to blame for this mess. Trump attacked the media with the "fake news" moniker and, in its collective outrage, the media hit back by becoming his inverse. The argument among progressives has been that Trump represented an aberration from democratic norms and that the media had a moral duty to save democracy by openly opposing his points of view.
The postmodern view on the far left is that all facts are ideologically communicated. So you might as well fight the other side. In that line of thinking, traditional media balance has been turned into the pejorative "bothsidesism" and the line between activism and journalism has all but evaporated. Even the most prestigious publications now often struggle to write and edit straight news stories. Savvy subscribers often just have to read the reporter's byline to know which way the story will lean.
That has not been going so well for the unity of the nation, has it? Some of this change, of course, is the natural consequence of the shifting economic model for news. With news sites now serving subscribers, they're incentivized to tell their fiscal sponsors what they want to read or hear. As with so much in this riven country, the population segments itself according to how it gets its news.
