CNN's Michael Smerconish says he fills a cable-news 'vacuum' with centrism

There has been a lot of talk lately about who CNN will give the time slot vacated by the disgraced Chris Cuomo to — and the consensus seems to be, who knows?

Among the people filling in have been Jim Acosta, Laura Coates Brianna Keller.... and Michael Smerconish.

But does Smerconish even want it?

“I don’t know if it’s a job I want, candidly,” Smerconish, 59, said in a recent interview. “If you had asked me that question 10 years ago I would have had a different answer, but I’m in a pretty good place, doing things that I mostly enjoy.”

Those things include hosting “The Michael Smerconish Show” on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel and “Smerconish” on Saturday mornings on CNN.

On the other hand, if Jeff Zucker, CNN’s president, called him and “said to me this is something I want and need you to do, I would take a serious look at it,” Smerconish said. But “I’ve not had any conversation with anybody — no email, no text, no nothing. I just keep doing my job.”

As a radio and TV host, Smerconish likes to guide the conversation

A conversation with Smerconish, not surprisingly, is a conversation with someone who likes to talk, and as a host he likes to guide the path.

“Let me first answer the question you didn’t ask, which is do I think I could do it and succeed?” Smerconish said. “And the answer to that is, absolutely. Unequivocally. There is a vacuum, and I am out there trying to prove every single day that there is a market for someone like me.”

To hear Smerconish tell it, he fills that vacuum with his more-centrist takes.

“When I say that there’s a void or a vacuum I should be clear — I’m not talking about CNN,” he said. “I’m talking about the media landscape generally, and the cable landscape in particular. I think it’s become a world of absolutes when that is not the way our society is.”

That has not been his experience away from the microphone and the studio, Smerconish said.

“I mean, I don’t meet people, unless they’re people who have a cable show or a radio show or a podcast, who see the world entirely through a left or right lens. I see people for whom the issues are a mixed bag. They’re liberal on some things, usually the social issues, more conservative on other things, usually the fiscal issues.

“You would never know they exist by tuning into the media.”

Smerconish styles himself as an independent thinker (“I do not bend to the Twitter mob”). He was a Republican who announced in a column in 2010 that he was leaving the party. He points to his newsletter and to his shows when explaining how best to think of him.

“I tell people if you read the newsletter any one day or you listen to me on radio any one day or CNN any one day you might come away thinking this guy’s left of center, this guy’s right of center,” he said. “Give me a couple of days and I will confuse you, I hope, and you will not be able to pigeonhole me.”

Media fuels polarization

Smerconish is clear on one thing: polarization is bad and media are making it worse.

“When I rank the factors that have driven us into the ditch there are a whole bunch of them, but the media influence is at the top of the list,” he said. “Sounds odd from a guy who makes his keep behind a microphone, but that’s the way I see it.”

So what does he see changing that?

“I fear that bottoming out is going to get us back to where we need to be,” he said. “Although I fear think we’re pretty close to bottoming out now.”

We may be closer than you think, he believes, when asked what he would define as the bottom.

“Probably what we’re facing today, where nobody talks to anyone else and nothing gets done,” he said. “I mean we’re electing a class of politician today who sort of thrive on not getting anything done and instead the drill has become say something incendiary and become a fundraising magnet.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Could Michael Smerconish take Chris Cuomo's slot? Does he want to?