CNN’s No Good, Very Bad Year
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Well, Chris Licht is officially out at CNN after a chaotic run as chairman and CEO. The network announced that Licht is leaving immediately. The dramatic culmination of CNN's chaotic year. But the guy, though,

though a problem, wasn't the real issue. It's the network's evolving approach to covering politics in the age of Trump. Can it be 1995 again? Can we turn back the clock? Can we ignore the extremist attitudes that are infecting our politics? I would say no. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. New threats call for new solutions, yet most of today's moral panics have been repeated in the press just about every decade.

A nightclub operator has made the most significant forecast for the 1970s. Nobody laughs anymore, he said seriously. Humor is dead. The hazards of longing for yesteryear. Another funny business. It's all coming up after this.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. When reviewing CNN's recent run of mishaps, ranging from mere dust-ups to dumpster fires, I recalled Queen Elizabeth's famous description of 1992. Not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.

In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilius. That dreadful year, her family, riven by divorces, separations and scandals, had debased and devalued the monarchy. Who wouldn't be reminded of CNN? But CNN's time of troubles lasted longer and lasts still.

As does the Marnikeys, actually, but never mind. We'll date the start of CNN's horribilous run, as the New York Times did to about 18 months ago, when its biggest star is shown the door. Being number one at CNN was a very proud accomplishment.

Chris Cuomo was fired after helping his brother, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, manage the PR fallout from charges of sexual harassment.

The Gov had been Chris's frequent guest when COVID was raging. Those guest spots were seen as both charming and dubious. Yeah, some say I shouldn't come on this show because you harass me. Too much fierce accountability? And provoke me.

Want a pat on the back? Love go? It's ad hominem, ad hominem attacks. Don't speak Spanish on my show. Do you think that you are an attractive person now because you're single and ready to mingle? But when Chris was shown choosing family over journalism, though he claimed CNN knew what he was doing, he was out.

After that, an even bigger departure. A towering figure in the news and media landscape for three decades now out of a job. Jeff Zucker announcing his resignation from CNN where he's been president since 2013. In a memo to CNN staff Wednesday, Zucker cited a failure to disclose a consensual relationship with my closest colleague as the reason for his departure. This is an incredible loss. Jeff is a remarkable person and an incredible leader.

He had this unique ability to make us feel special. After Zucker helped vault Donald Trump to power by giving him practically unrestricted access to CNN's airtime, I exaggerate, but not by much, he seemed to acknowledge that offering Trump 24/7, though good business, was bad journalism.

Or maybe he just took umbrage at Trump's relentless abuse. Mr. President-elect, can you give us a question? Don't be rude. Can you give us a question? I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news. So, Zucker supported his hosts and reporters in calling out Trump's lies and fulminating when they deemed fulmination appropriate.

Here's Jake Tapper. The campaign that Trump and his allies in the media and his members of his family and the Trump allied websites and such are leveling with charges so heinous, I'm not even going to say them. Just nonsense, crap, tied into QAnon, tied into Pizzagate, tied into the worst things you could say about a person with no evidence, just completely made up, is so disgusting and so beneath evidence.

But that free hand put Jeff Zucker out of step with his boss, CEO and president of CNN's parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, David Zasloff. Most of the news networks around the world and here in the U.S., they're advocacy networks. Zasloff said he wished to forge a middle ground, or perhaps one less hostile to Trump's GOP,

So he picked Chris Licht, successful producer of morning shows and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to take over the huge enterprise that is CNN. As there are networks here that are advocating right and left, Chris is going to be advocating for truth. He's going to be advocating for facts. He's going to be advocating for journalism first. One of the biggest media stories of the week is right here. It's the end of this show.

CNN has canceled reliable sources. Brian Stelter was the host of CNN's Sunday morning media show for nearly nine years. Chris Licht pulled the plug last August. Stelter, as much of CNN's on-air folks, had been forthright. For two and a half years in the Trump presidency, and his racism is becoming more obvious?

More frightening? What Zaslav might call advocating. There are millions of Americans, black and brown Americans, who know exactly what he means when he says, "Go back to where you came from." They've heard those words. There's no bigger story in the country right now. Tucker Carlson would never. Jeff Zucker runs CNN like a political campaign. Everyone at CNN has a role, just like in a campaign. At the lowest level are the goons. Their job is to smack the people Jeff Zucker tells them to smack.

One of these jowly screamers, Zucker's personal favorite, hosts a weekend show about the media. Every Saturday, he gives voice to his boss's weird obsessions in vendettas and calls it Then there's Don Lemon. He left his primetime CNN show to become one of three hosts of the revamped CNN This Morning. Ratings tank.

Lemon was mismatched with his co-hosts and perhaps with morning shows in general. Nikki Haley is in her prime. Sorry. A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s. What are you talking about? That's not according to me. Prime for what? It depends. It's just like prime. If you look it up, if you Google when is a woman in her prime, it'll say 20s, 30s, and 40s. I don't necessarily... 40s. Oh, I got it in my head.

In April, Lemon was shown the door. And then in May, the deeply derided Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire with an audience of loudly enthusiastic Trump supporters, an election denier as a post-show guest, and lone moderator Caitlin Collins trying to quench the great Chicago fire with a water pistol.

That's the question that investigators have, I think, is why you held on to those documents when you knew the federal government was seeking them and then had given you a subpoena to return them. Are you ready? Are you ready? Can I talk? Yeah, what's the answer? Do you mind? I would like for you to answer the question. Okay, it's very simple to answer. That's why I asked it. It's very simple to... You're a nasty person, I'll tell you that.

So things were not going well at CNN, which a year earlier had pulled the plug on CNN Plus after nearly five weeks and up to $300 million down the drain. Revenues are down, ratings too, and then there was that Chris Licht profile in The Atlantic that made him look like a man desperately over his head and at odds with his staff on fundamental questions of journalism. He was fired this week, and here we are.

Brian Stelter, the former host of CNN's defunct Reliable Sources, has been closely following his old network's travails. Brian, welcome back to the show. Hi, good to be here. Thank you. It was Licht who fired you, but you don't blame him for that. You wrote that you even laughed together about how nice he was when he fired you. What was that about? Oh, I don't know.

I think Chris Licht was put in a somewhat impossible position when he was given the title of CNN CEO. As one of his own friends said to me, you know, he was dealt a bad hand and then he played it badly. So, yes, he is partly responsible. But there were larger forces at play within Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of CNN. And there's a part of me that thinks the reason the show was canceled was because they just wanted to try to decontroversialize CNN, depolarize it, lower the temperature, bring the volume down. And they didn't.

And those may be admirable goals. You know, that's why I point out that Licht was gracious when he was canceling the show. It wasn't as if we were at war. We weren't at odds. But I personally am very skeptical that you actually can lower the temperature.

So Chris Licht, you say he was a good producer with good ideas who disappeared when he started at CNN because he was determined to be someone else, which is to say the CEO. You know, he came in with the swagger of a producer, but then retreated into the boardroom, into the C-suite. And that may have been what Zasloff told him to do. I don't know.

Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, it was clear that Licht was making sure he was cultivating his relationship with Zaslav years before Zaslav called him and asked him to run CNN. In fact, Zaslav did not interview anybody else for the job.

Lick's failure, and I think he would admit this, is that he didn't manage down. He did not develop relationships inside CNN. He focused so much on managing up into the corporate structure that he did not ever really win the newsroom, win the programming team, win the executives or the engineers at CNN. Do you think that John Malone had an influence on this as well?

John Malone was the mentor to Zaslav for many, many years. He was the most important person in Zaslav's professional life. He was the controlling shareholder of the company Zaslav was running. Now, that's no longer the case. Malone's position has been diluted. He's now just one of many board members of Warner Brothers Discovery. But he is a key shareholder because of that long relationship with Zaslav. He is also a Fox fan and a Trump donor.

I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, you know, actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing. He said that in November of 2021, and it was very offensive to the journalists who were working at CNN. He also complimented Fox and made people think that he wanted CNN to become more like Fox.

Now, we haven't heard a lot from Malone since, but on the day that I was fired from CNN, the New York Times emailed him, asked, did you have something to do with Stelter's exit? And he said, I wasn't directly involved, but he also said, I want CNN to be more centrist. So let's move to the article that you call the 15,000-word defenestration of Lick.

Given the internal struggles he had at CNN, why didn't he see it coming? What did he expect from this piece? I think Licht felt misunderstood last spring and last summer when The Atlantic contacted him asking him to participate in this profile. I think he really, really wanted to make the case to a sympathetic journalist that his plan was the right plan and that he could revive CNN, that he could, quote unquote, save journalism, maybe even help save democracy.

I know this sounds silly, but that was the original dream headline for the Atlantic piece. You know, Lick's aides, they wanted a story that would say something like, can Chris Lick save the news? And they thought that Tim Alberta would be well-placed to write that because he felt CNN went too far in the Trump years?

That's right. And I've talked to Alberta about this. He was sympathetic and is sympathetic to the vision and mission of CNN that had been outlined by Zaslav and Licht to try to moderate the tone and make it a trusted news brand for everyone. Now, whether that's possible or not, Alberta was interested in seeing Licht try and seeing what would happen.

But by the time Alberto was ready to actually write the story, the story at CNN was much worse than it was last summer. The ratings were lower. The morale was much lower. He had already, quote unquote, lost the room.

And Alberta was perfectly positioned to actually document all of that. The article came out on a Friday. On the following Monday, Licht apologized in an all-staff meeting you had inside Access. And you reported on what happened for New York Magazine. What did he say and what didn't he say that maybe he should have said?

We have to recognize that by Sunday, many of the top anchors and journalists and producers at CNN had concluded that it was a goner, that there was no way back. And some people had even politely tried to tell him that. And he was in denial. He was defiant. He believed that Zaslav would still let him have time to win people back, to win trust back. And that's what he said Monday morning. He said Monday morning, I'm going to fight like hell to earn your trust back.

He apologized for making himself the news and not CNN. But what he did not apologize for were his disparaging remarks about the past journalism of CNN, the Trump era, Jeff Zucker era CNN.

Now, listen, I was there for that entire time. I'm not going to claim that Jeff Zucker was a perfect leader. I'm not going to claim CNN always had the perfect approach to covering Donald Trump. This stuff is really complicated and really hard. But even if you want to mock and ridicule the Trump era coverage, even if you think it was atrocious, why would you tell that to a reporter? Why would you insult all those people? Why would you hurt all those staffers?

So it was notable on Monday that Licht did not apologize. He did not go into detail about what he thought was wrong. And maybe that's because he wasn't sorry. I don't know. But I found it so interesting that he even tried on Monday morning to say that he was going to stay in the job because if the folks you're supposed to be leading don't believe you and don't trust you and won't be led by you,

You can still be a boss, but you can't be a leader. You know, what amazes me is, I know there's been criticism of Zucker for becoming a kind of off-site complaint box for...

for everybody who was pissed off at Licht. The New York Times called him a grievance switchboard, yes. But he is the one who turned Trump from a reality star into a presidential candidate. He is the one who would focus the camera on an empty Trump podium, even as his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was actually speaking. Yeah.

He was the one who found Trump to be catnip, and I don't understand why he isn't paying for that still. Number one, I think he is. You just raised those points. And I think it's significant that he's one of the only media executives who has looked backwards and said, we showed too many of those rallies. We went too far overboard. Yes, Zucker and others at NBC made The Apprentice what it was, but it was really, I believe, Fox that made Trump a political figure.

As somebody who was watching the coverage at the time, all the focus was on Trump at CNN as well. Well, because Trump was the most incredible story of the decade. Yeah, but CNN helped make him.

You know, I guess this is something we could dispute. But Fox's audience was always going to like him, right? The fact that we're still talking about it, though, this is the point, right? A decade later, we're still wrestling with these questions, and we should be. This is one of the most important debates in journalism. How and whether and when and where to cover Donald Trump, what to do, how to do it better.

That's why I thought it was so strange that Licht said to Alberta, the Atlantic interviewer, he said, how are we going to cover Trump? That's not something I stay up at night thinking about. He said, it's very simple. It's very simple. Cover him like any other candidate. I wish it were simple.

You know, it's actually one of the most complicated editorial challenges for the news business. Like, there should be an ongoing dialogue at CNN about how to cover demagogues. And let me tell you, Brooke, there is an ongoing dialogue. There are fantastic journalists and standards and practices officials and producers and editors. They do talk about these issues. They do discuss it. A lot of them do have regrets about 2016. Yeah.

But number one, they don't air it out to a random reporter doing a profile piece. And number two, they want to have that discussion in-house and they want to have it with the boss. The boss didn't seem to want to have that conversation.

And what about the boss of the boss, David Zaslav? The departure of Licht is not going to change this impulse of CNN to make the news channel welcoming to MAGA Republicans. Well, and this is a thorny issue, right? Because when Zaslav says we want both sides to be represented, that we want Republicans back on CNN, I think most CNN staffers share those values and want to make sure they're covering the full story, the entire story.

However, as you and I both know, there are not always two equal sides. Sometimes there are five or six sides. Sometimes it is highly misleading to pretend like both sides are equally reality-based and equally responsible. And that's the part that Zaslav's not talked about in public.

I think CNN is too useful to the Republican Party as a foil and an enemy to ever become a friendly place. If they come on CNN, it's to be able to use it as a punching bag, just as Trump did. That is so interesting.

Sure, Republicans will come on so that they can yell at CNN face to face and bask in that dubious glory. Right. Then they can say they went into the lion's den. They're not afraid of a fight. Owning the libs is the most important campaign gesture that these sorts of extreme Republicans can make.

This is where it gets so complicated about the Warner Brothers Discovery management team, because they clearly want CNN to be news for everybody, right? To appeal to all Americans. The idea of owning the libs by going on CNN, well, that wouldn't make sense under their strategy because CNN's not liberal. But you can't be a journalist without asking sharp questions and follow-ups and appearing adversarial when faced with blatant untruths. It is possible that the Warner Brothers Discovery management team thinks you can't.

thinks that you can put on a more plain, vanilla version of the news. And I've had staffers come to me concerned about this. One of them saying, is Lick's exit a real change in direction? Or is Zaslav just going to, quote, find someone more competent and less obnoxious to execute the same vision? What do you think? I don't see how it can be a change in direction while Zaslav is still there. I think almost anything can happen. What I mean by that is,

Will Discovery own CNN in a year or two? You're right. Prediction is a Muggs game. But in the meantime, you are nailing it on the head, which is, can it be 1995 again? Can we turn back the clock?

Can we ignore the extremist attitudes that are infecting our politics? Can we pretend like we don't live in an age of AI and power disinformation? Can we act like weaponized propaganda and political radicalization are not warping our politics? And I would say no. If it is possible to strip all the controversy away from CNN and make it a brand, make it a place for everybody from all parties, if that is possible, I'm on board. I am a thousand percent on board with that.

But having lived this for the past nine years inside CNN, I don't see how that's possible. I don't know how we get back to that place. I wonder whether or not the strong reaction against what happened in the Trump town hall serves as a cautionary tale. I thought it would, but...

The reports about the Nikki Haley town hall on Sunday was that she was barely challenged at all by Jake Tapper, who was certainly bold in his views after the Trump town hall. I think other cable and broadcast networks watched and learned from CNN's handling of Trump in the town hall and are going to do things differently as a result.

Fox News, for example, all the interviews Trump is doing on Fox, even the friendly chit-chats with Sean Hannity, those are being pre-taped. They are not happening live. Fox presumably is doing so because of the fallout from Dominion and Smartmatic, and they are afraid of Trump defaming those companies or others live on the air. Now there's a cautionary tale you can't avoid. A hundred percent.

But I will tell you, my sources at Fox are having a field day laughing at CNN, saying, you know, we're being more responsible with Donald Trump than CNN was. So those folks at Fox are enjoying this. I do think it is true that other networks like NBC and ABC were having some conversations about holding a town hall with Trump this spring. And those conversations changed as a result of the CNN event.

There was an internal CNN report that was released this week that looked at just how much viewers trusted CNN as a news source. And it was leaked to Semaphore after the Atlantic article was released. And it said there were some things CNN did that did lose the trust of its viewers, needless to say. What do you think of that report, where it came from, what it revealed?

I think it makes all the sense in the world that trust in CNN took a hit in the past few years. How could it not? When you have the President of the United States trying to basically destroy the network through his tweets and his statements and his behaviors...

And when you have a hopefully once-in-a-lifetime pandemic where information is confusing and murky and evolving, where the science is hard to keep up with, and when awful decisions are being made in real time, of course trust in news brands is going to suffer. Now, one of the points of this trust report is that trust did not just decline among Republicans. It also declined among Democrats and those who identify as independents.

And I think Licht in some ways might have cloaked himself in that so-called trust report in order to explain and justify his moves. As David Graham wrote for The Atlantic on Wednesday, Licht wanted to turn CNN back into the neutral arbiter of truth that it once was or seemed to be.

Without understanding that such a role is impossible in today's fractured, polarized cable news environment. I think that is the key here is even if you wanted to roll back the clock and try to go back to a day where everybody trusted CNN. First of all, that day never actually existed. It was ridiculed as the Clinton News Network and before that Chicken Noodle News. Right. And second, there's no way to escape our feuding, fragmented environment. Right.

At least no way that I see out of this. So of course trust levels are going to be lower. But what you have to do when trust levels are low, in my humble opinion, is show the audience you do have that you're there for them, that you hear them, that you stand with them against the liars and the dissemblers and the disinformation artists.

You know, I think for all the critiques of CNN and the Trump years, many of them fair. I think what we were trying to do is we were trying to be louder than the liars in order to explain and debunk the nonsense that was out there. And I knew we could argue and debate about whether we did it the right way. But I think the question going forward with this Zaslav era CNN is whether he wants the anchors to be loud or whether he wants them to be quiet.

And we have seen some evidence that he wants them to be quiet. And it's easy to do that in 2022 when there's no campaign season really hot and heavy. But in November 2024, if Donald Trump is once again running for president, once again losing, and once again claiming he's won an election he lost, what does CNN do then? How loud does CNN get? I think that is an interesting and challenging question.

Brian, thank you so much. Thank you. Brian Stelter is a longtime media reporter and the former host of CNN's Reliable Sources. Coming up, it seems impossible to apply the old rules of journalism to this strange new world, but it's long past time we figured it out. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. As CNN enters the 2024 election cycle, the network will be forced to chart a new course. Will they platform the scenery-chewing extremists of the GOP? And if so, how are they going to navigate a ceaseless maelstrom of lies?

According to press critic Jay Rosen, one of the most revealing parts of Tim Alberta's explosive profile in The Atlantic of Chris Licht was Licht's explanation of how the network would cover Trump in the upcoming elections. Business as usual. Licht said, quote,

Well, I think it's a brain dead response. I mean, there's no real precedent in post-war America for a president like Trump. The usual way of dealing with false statements by public figures is to check them and the resulting embarrassment acts as a deterrent. But Trump doesn't care if he's fact-checked.

He actually profits from the imagery of journalists trying to point out how wrong he is. In fact, he frequently says they're attacking me because they hate you to his core audiences. And for all those reasons, he is a challenge to cover, which I think most people and journalists except for Chris Licht know. He said that CNN journalists had joined the team against Trump.

And I believe the events were very different than the way Malone and Zaslav and Chris Licht looked at them. How do you look at them? I seem to go back to Steve Bannon's comments to Michael Lewis in 2018, where he said, the Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s**t. He was signaling that the Trump movement is going to exit from normal politics.

By attacking democratic institutions and starting culture wars, generating a lot of heat and commotion and energy, and then powering their movement with that energy. And false claims and conspiracy theories become your basic tools. This style of politics, which is also called the fire hose of falsehood, is a nightmare for any get-both-sides newsroom.

In his infamous profile in The Atlantic, Tim Alberta quotes Chris Licht saying, Everyone has an agenda trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth. And that source, said Licht, will be CNN. What do you think he meant by absolute truth? Brooke, I have no idea. No.

Since when does journalism deal with absolute truths? It deals with versions of the truth that we try to make better over time. Woodward and Bernstein are famous for their formula for good reporting, the best available version of the truth.

It's sort of the opposite of the absolute truth. It seems as if this goal of absolute truth would in Licht's mind be served by filling a hall with Trumpists and having Trump trump at them.

Yeah, but I think the real point of offering Trump the town hall opportunity and filling the audience with Trump supporters was to persuade Trump that CNN can be a home for him again and kind of restore some sort of normal relationship with him as a political figure.

But the end result was a kind of crash in Chris Slick's illusions about what a proper agenda for change was in this company.

They brought Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida, on after the Trump town hall, who also wasn't fact-checked. You won't state your opinion about actually, factually what happened in the 2020 election? You guys want me to make a statement? Frank, let me tell you right now. This is what's frustrating to a lot of people. You want me to state it the way you want me to state it. No, I don't. I am telling you the ideas and the reasons behind why... Byron Donalds is an election denier. The

The formula that Chris Licht eventually developed for himself to explain his view on these things was some people like rain, some people don't like rain. But we are not going to give the microphone to somebody who denies it's raining when it's raining. He thought it put it perfectly well.

Byron Donalds is the person saying it's not raining when it's raining. So the news media has had a few years to think about how they're going to cover Trump. Yeah. The news landscape is certainly a different place from 2016. So the question is, how do you deal with fact checking and the standard of truth?

You can go back to Jonathan Karl. Karl is the chief correspondent of White House for ABC News. He's also the former president of the White House Correspondents Association and completely a consensus figure within the press. When he was on Brian Stelter's program, Brian asked him, what are we going to do if this guy runs again?

And Jonathan Karl went through a list of the problems that arise. It's an immense challenge because you're covering somebody running in a system that is trying to undermine that very system and somebody who is going to be perpetually lying. He is trying to repeat a lie so many times that people will believe it. And as journalists, we can't be a conduit for that lie. What does a debate look like with Donald Trump in it?

You can't air Trump's speeches unfiltered as often happened in the 2016 campaign. Brian says, "Okay, so what do we do?" And he didn't know, but at least he understood that it was a huge challenge to his profession. I assumed that between then and now, ABC News, which is where Jonathan works, would have thought through some of his suggestions.

But I don't think that happened. I think the national news media is trying to cover Trump and the Republican Party with no substantial changes in their routines, even though they have learned a lot since 2016. In 2020, on this program and elsewhere, you called for journalists to be in emergency mode. Do you think we should still be in it?

Well, by emergency mode, I meant that Trump's political style breaks all the conventions of political reporting, makes them unusable.

The immediate problem was his COVID briefings. He was misinforming the public about matters of life and death. And so in that situation, you have to think very carefully about becoming a platform because what he was doing was so dangerous. Mm-hmm.

Since then, we've had January 6th. Oh, yeah, it's gotten worse. So are we still in the mode? And what is the mode? Well, first of all, you don't broadcast Donald Trump live. You don't assume that you can fact check him in real time. That's impossible. You have to come up with a plan before you're in a situation like CNN found itself in. It would help if journalists shifted their energy and their attention to

from the odds of who's going to win and the whole horse race discourse to the stakes, meaning what are the consequences for daily life? What's going to change in this country depending on the results of the 2024 election? That's probably the oldest piece of advice one can give for election coverage. It is. Less about the horse race, more about the issues, the stakes, the consequences, the

But now more than ever? Now more than ever. It's true that it's said every four years, but this time the stakes are huge. We're in that kind of a crack up of the old system. You've also said that you need to have clear guidelines for what you are willing to air. Yeah. I mean, is there a line that people cannot cross on your programs?

And if so, how do you keep track of them? And how do you explain your policy? So let's say that we acknowledge the stakes and that we understand our obligation not to enable the fire hose of lies. We're certainly going to be unpopular in certain quarters.

And what is the journalists moral position? Certainly you can't silence the whole far right wing of the Republican Party. No, you can't. You can't ignore what they are doing. You can't completely cut off their microphone. You can't pretend that they are not steps away from being in power.

And yet, if you simply report on what they're saying and doing, that's not practical either because you end up passing their falsehoods onto your audiences. And there are a lot of costs for that.

as CNN is discovering with the aftermath of its first town hall, the falling ratings and what seems like a lot of viewer anger. I know I'm not going to look at Anderson Cooper the way I once did after that. Why? What did he do? Well, he had kind of a lecture on air the second day after the town hall. Many of you have expressed deep anger and disappointment. You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again.

But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away? If we all only listen to those we agree with, it may actually do the opposite. As if the only alternatives were either give Trump the microphone, and if you don't, you're stuck in your silo, which struck many people as oversimplified.

You're a journalism teacher. You're a journalism critic. But you don't see a clear path to coverage of this coming election. I don't have all the answers, but I know we can't just repeat what we've done in the past. Jay, thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU and a press critic. Coming up, why does it seem like our political culture is stuck on repeat?

This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is. Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate. Then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like. Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. We just heard about a big cable news channel, actually an entire news industry that seems to be trapped in the past. But the story of CNN is just one example of how our political culture is stuck on repeat.

Last year, OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger brought us this piece about how so many of today's media-fueled freakouts are really moral panics from yesteryear just coming around again.

In July, Zaid Khan, a 24-year-old engineer from New York, posted a video about quiet quitting, and it went viral. Since then, the trend has spread like wildfire. Working overtime? No thanks. Late night emails? Ignore those. Pick up an extra project to get ahead? Hard pass. Remember the brouhaha over quiet quitting? On social media, it was a shorthand for striking a healthy work-life balance.

But on cable news, it was evidence of moral decay. Well, the veteran economist says he believes that quiet quitting is one of the key reasons that U.S. workers' productivity fell 4.1% in the second quarter. Quiet quitting is a really bad idea. If you're a quiet quitter,

You're a loser. If you found yourself rolling your eyes during these news cycles, you weren't alone. It was someone unironically complaining that nobody wants to work anymore, and I was feeling a little bit annoyed. And I thought, oh, I'm sure people have said this before. This is Paul Ferry. He works at the medical school at the University of Calgary, but he's a political scientist by training. And he also moonlights as a media critic known for his singular use of old newspapers. It was partly probably a vaguely misspent youth.

A fun activity that I would do when I was, you know, 15 would be look at old microfiches of newspapers. As the teens do. Yeah, no, it's a very, very cool activity, I must say. It's sort of just the idea that you can kind of see what people were thinking about at the time. Last year, when talking heads were saying nobody wants to work anymore, he decided to see if this type of panic had cropped up in the past. You know, I just looked through some of the old newspaper archives. Basically every newspaper

U.S. State has their own statewide archive. California has a particularly nice one. Here's some of what he found from the Germantown News in Tennessee in 2014. What happened to the work ethic in America? Nobody wants to work anymore. When I first started to work as a teenager, I saw people work hard.

And another from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, 1999. Nobody wants to work anymore, Cecil, a shoemaker, said. They all want to work in front of a computer and make lots of money. The News Journal in Ohio, 1979. Nobody wants to work anymore.

Signed, a disgusted businessman. I'm going to skip past a bunch of examples from the 60s, 50s, 40s, and 30s and go to 1922, the Mulberry News. What is the cause of unemployment and hard times? The manufacturer and businessmen say it's because nobody wants to work anymore unless they can be paid enough wages to work half of the time and loaf half of the time. All right, let's do one more. 1894, Rooks County Record.

With all the minds of this country shut down by strikers, what will the poor editor do for coal next winter? It is becoming apparent that nobody wants to work these hard times. Ferry put all of these examples in a Twitter thread that went super viral over the summer. Over 300,000 people liked his tweets. It really seemed to strike a nerve. When you see people complaining about it every decade for 120 years, it's

It's probably less to do with, you know, current context and more to do with kind of bigger systems. I'm looking at the pattern of articles that you have selected, which is by no means a scientific study. But what I do see is the media allowing the employer to set a narrative over and over and over.

There were fewer, certainly, examples of taking the perspective of the worker. Ferry was really surprised by the success of this first thread, so he set off on a mission to interrogate other popular narratives. 2022 was the year Tucker Carlson released his End of Men documentary, a film that claimed decreasing testosterone levels would bring collapse. ♪

Civilization is like a woman wooed. She's won by the love of the strong man and lost by the impotence of the weak one. The Greeks called this anticyclosis, the life cycle of any society. The same sort of fear that Missouri Senator Josh Hawley surely hoped to cash in on with his new book titled Manhood, or what we've heard from the world's most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.

at the end of all these civilizations, with the Roman civilization, the Greek Empire, they all started falling into this thing where they wanted to redefine gender. They do, yeah. It's really fascinating. You can actually see it in like the statues and stuff. Yeah. It's really interesting. They go from being like these super buff dudes and like sexy babes and then all of a sudden they all look like, you know, an anime character or something. I don't know. The gender panic seeped into state houses and school board meetings.

It's been an extreme political reaction for sure, but moral panic over gender norms is far from new. Paul Ferry dove back into the newspaper archives to create a Twitter thread he titled, A Brief History of Men Today Are Too Feminine and Women Too Masculine.

Let's start with the Raleigh News and Observer, 1997. Southerners think that men are less manly and that women are less feminine than they used to be and that both of those things are not good. And this from the Arizona Daily Sun, 1984. I'm an older woman. I believe in equal rights and all that. But don't you think all this women's lib stuff has contributed to the wimping of American men?

Am I just imagining it? Or is today's man less manly than those I grew up with? Signed, A Strong Woman for a Strong Man. Here's a Reuters dispatch from New Zealand, published in 1977. Living in high-rise apartment buildings helps make men effeminate, a York University psychiatrist and professor of environmental studies said here yesterday.

I like this one because it basically said, "Men who don't garden."

Paul Ferry. The Redwood City Tribune in California, 1950. Wow.

What a discovery! 1940, the Daily News leader, Virginia. At the meeting of the American Medical Association, a speaker maintained that the American people are getting less vigorous, the men more feminine and the women more masculine, because we don't eat raw meat. The Associated Press, 1925. Men becoming effeminate. New York physician says they are and cites lilac pajamas and embroidered bathrobes as proof.

What is going on with a lot of these clippings is people will take any activity that they notice and say, "Okay, well, if I have this generalized panic about gender roles, I'm going to figure out a way to shoehorn in this example."

A lot of these arguments start to feel almost like a songbook. So they sing this song again. Girls were girls and boys were boys when I was a cop. Now we don't know who is who or even what's what. Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide. Nobody knows who's walking inside. Those masculine women and feminine men.

Each article we just heard presented the fluidity of gender as a fresh force in our culture, rather than a fixture of the human experience. That's how moral panics work. By definition, they're based on an overheated perception fueled by the media that certain behaviors or people are dangerously deviant and pose a threat to society.

much like how nowadays we hear that Americans have lost their sense of humor. Last night, a Minneapolis club called First Avenue canceled a show by Dave Chappelle citing public outcry, meaning they got a silly letter from some purple-haired gnome with a BMI of 158.

The club caved to a Change.org petition demanding not to platform transphobe Dave Chappelle. Breaking news overnight, comedian Dave Chappelle attacked on stage while performing at the Hollywood Bowl. The attack on Dave Chappelle is the beginning of the end of comedy. That's the message from Howie Mandel, who says he's afraid to perform on stage. Kids used to go to college and lose their virginity. Now they go to lose their sense of humor.

As long as I can remember, stand-up comedians have been saying people are too sensitive. Paul started combing newspaper archives and he found a familiar pattern. As in 1995, the Fresno Beat. Nobody can take a joke anymore. Just ask poor old Trice Harvey.

All the assemblymen from Bakersfield tried to do was a little stand-up, and the next thing he knew, he was up on sexual harassment charges. What did he do? What did he do? I'm looking this one up. In a secret settlement, the assembly paid $10,000 to a secretary who complained that over a two-year period, she was the target of vulgar sexual remarks made by her boss, veteran assemblyman Trice Harvey.

The author of this article just unquestionably takes his side. That's journalism for you. 1984, the Des Moines Register. I get depressed at the growing list of things Americans can't make jokes about anymore. At the ludicrously high damages awarded by your courts for trivial personal slights.

The Orlando Sentinel in 1970. Humor is dead.

The

That is an over-extrapolation if I've ever read one. Yeah, it again taps into the idea of there was this former time that was perfect in some sort of way. And in this example, it was everyone was apparently hilarious and everyone was always laughing at every joke.

And now, you know, that has somehow disappeared. And what's interesting about that one, too, is that you have the receipts to prove that wasn't true. I mean, you could go back and see the same claim being used just eight years earlier. The men who draw the nation's comic strips complained Monday that people were losing their sense of humor. That's from 1962, the Arizona Daily Star. Here's another from the Stillwater News Press in Oklahoma in 1949. The man on the street is losing his sense of humor.

An expert on laughs reported today. Here's a fascinating article from the South Bend Tribune in 1927, shortly before vaudeville was thinned out by the Great Depression and the film industry. It's about a traveling troupe that stopped staging an anti-Irish routine. Here's a quote from Eddie Hester, a retired member of the company. I'm sorry to see them scrap that old streetcar gag. That old wheeze pulled me out of many a hole.

All you had to do when you hit a new town was to find out about some particularly rotten streetcar line and then give them the works.

It was always good for a laugh, and I never heard of anybody squawking about it. Of course people were squawking about it. In his book, The Irish Way, author James R. Bennett documents a Manhattan protest in 1907. Remember, this was a period of intense anti-Irish discrimination. The protest was led by hundreds of Irish-American men who were enraged by an offensive stage act.

The irony here is that Irish vaudeville actors routinely performed in blackface, stoking street fights with African Americans. Also at that time, rabbis protested the stage Jew, a vaudeville staple promoting the very anti-Semitic tropes we'd later see in Nazi propaganda.

Paul Ferry's research shows us that comedy has long thrived and evolved alongside a messy negotiation between entertainers and their audience. In other words, none of this is new. Whether they're moral panics or concerns about work ethic, gender roles...

They might seem very current and very of this specific era, but just like the fact that we keep going back to them suggests, I mean, perhaps a disappointing lack of creativity. In fact, the current trend of labeling things "woke" and "cancel culture" suggests that we've just left a golden era when bigoted jokes were never met with backlash.

That's just not true. This is an old tug of war, only now supercharged by social media and a new generation of reactionaries.

And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondio, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Suzanne Gabber. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.