CNN's Folly

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Leslie Moonves (at that time CBS executive chairman and CEO) famously said back in 2016. And, in case how it was good for CBS wasn’t quite clear enough, he also said, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”

Fun, indeed! I remember right about that time remonstrating with an acquaintance who thought it would be "exciting" if Trump ran for President. Exciting, indeed! Well, we have as a nation paid dearly for such bizarre and narrow notions of fun and excitement!

How and why Trump managed to get elected President in 2016 will be debated for decades to come. Clearly one contributing factor was the all the free attention he received, all the unpaid media coverage he got because he was so entertaining and exciting. His shattering of all the rules of political decorum, which in an earlier era would have served to disqualify and terminate his candidacy, confirmed his novelty and freshness and newsworthiness, how fun and exciting his candidacy was to some. For what might have marginalized others, Trump was normalized and awarded the presidency.

Well that was then. Now, two election cycles later, the news media appear to have learned little - except the perennially cynical lesson that that what is not good for America may still be good for (in this instance) CNN. Of course, the criticism CNN had received for staging what was, in effect, a free Trump campaign rally under the guise of a journalistic exercise has been loud and  widespread. Will it matter, however? Or have we again embarked on the path taken two election cycles ago, as if Trump were a normal presidential candidate, as if the audience at such a "town hall" were traditional voters rather than adherents of an anti-democratic, anti-constitutional cult?

The only difference between then and now is that we have had actual experience of a Trump presidency and MAGA party misrule. So we know now, better than we did then, the danger we are putting our country in, the danger we are putting the world in, if we act as if we didn't really know better. But that seems to have been the way CNN acted. 

As Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic: "The result was a disaster that was not only foreseeable but also as predictable as the laws of physics, a cringe-inducing display that damaged CNN’s reputation, put one of its rising stars in a no-win situation, cheapened journalism, and undermined our political process—all in the span of little more than an hour."

Academics, analysts, and pundits may well examine CNN's motives. Meanwhile, all of us must live with the potentially dire consequences.

Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images.