CNN Can’t Stop Pandering to the People Who Despise It Most
No media outlet has found itself more frequently in the crosshairs of the president's war on the press than CNN, which has alternately been barred from the White House grounds, smeared at press conferences as "fake news," and featured prominently in an old WWE clip in which its logo is superimposed over the face of a man who gets clotheslined by Donald Trump. Threats against its journalists and facilities are disturbingly commonplace, while Republican politicians, following Trump's lead, have become openly contemptuous of its reporting.
Today the network responded to this broken fire hydrant of malevolence by hiring Sarah Isgur—a longtime GOP strategist and occasional cable-news talking head who boasts no other experience in journalism—to "coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign." Through 2018, Isgur served as spokesperson for former attorney general Jeff Sessions, who needs no introduction; before that, she worked in various capacities for the failed presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz.
As the old saying goes: If you can't get them to stop launching vicious attacks as part of a cynical, coordinated effort to discredit your journalistic bona fides, hire those people to help determine the future of your journalistic enterprise instead.
CNN realized long ago that in the Trump era, trafficking in vapid, both-sides infotainment would prove to be a profitable investment. This hire, however, is different in kind: A person who has spent her professional life working to get Republican politicians elected is now tasked with helping to steer a major network's treatment of an election in which a prominent Republican politician will be a principal contestant. It is roughly the equivalent of hiring Tim Cook as a new "tech-industry editor" and then assigning him to cover the next iPhone announcement.
Desperate stunts like this one are designed to push back against the prevailing right-wing narrative that CNN—or NBC, or CBS, or whichever outlet broke the latest unflattering story about the White House—is hopelessly biased against Trump and/or Republicans and/or conservatism in general. It is the same reason CNN retained the services of Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany long after they proved they have nothing of substance to contribute, and why it still employs a deeply unserious person like Rick Santorum today. Their airtime is a talisman against persistent accusations of partiality; perhaps CNN imagines that Isgur's presence behind the scenes will strengthen their case.
The error here is believing that any of these counter-arguments is coming from a place of good faith, or that hiring the likes of Isgur will somehow fortify them from attacks against the free press. The modern Republican Party is a loose confederation of fiscal conservatives who tolerate bigotry and bigots who tolerate fiscal conservatism, and the constituencies its pitch appeals to get smaller every day; the GOP's political future, then, depends largely on its ability to persuade people that what the media reports about the world around them is not true.
With this hire, CNN plunges further into the sort of messy, tit-for-tat process that does more to undermine its credibility than anything the president could ever say. Elevating an unabashed partisan to a nonpartisan role is an obvious disservice to viewers at home, who count on the network's independence; the move signals that CNN is less interested in rigorous journalism than it is in performing even-handedness. And now, if executives ever decide that paying a Jeff Sessions hack to curate straight news was maybe a misguided choice, changing course will only confirm to detractors that the network really is the left-wing rag they want it to be.
