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While I no longer work full-time in cable TV, I still follow the ups (and mostly) downs of the industry. It was my life for many years. I still have lots of friends in that world. And old habits die hard.
And thatās why the recent news of a āratings boostā for CNN left me profoundly depressed. Not because CNN is doing well, but because of the reason, per AdWeek, that CNN is doing so well: The success of CNN NewsNight With Abby Phillip.
Let me say something important: I know Abby very casually. I think she is a good journalist and a gifted broadcaster. And, I think she does her level best in the show to keep it from getting too off the rails too often. I have absolutely nothing against her.
The problem isnāt her, itās the conceit of her show.
(I alsoāand you can choose to believe this or notāhave NOTHING against CNN. Yes, they laid me off! Yes, it sucked! But that was years ago.)
Plenty of people may agree with my sentiments ā in fact, I know they do because they have told me so ā but they donāt want to say it. But I donāt say this lightly: I think what is happening in shows like āNewsNightā is actively bad for our democracy.
The whole point of NewsNight is to platform people who are diametrically opposed politically and, well, watch them fight. It is to put piranhas in a bowl and watch them tear each other apart.
While Phillip is the hostāshe navigates between spectacles and occasionally weighs in herselfāthe real star of the show is conservative commentator Scott Jennings.
Jennings, a longtime Kentucky political operative, has risen to fame (and, among liberals, infamy) for his role on the show, where he unapologetically skewers liberal guests.
But while Jennings is the straw that stirs the drink, the entire showāwhether or not Jennings is on itāfocuses on one thing: Political combat. It is literally just people shouting at each other most of the time.
I am not at all opposed to airing political differences in conversation. Especially on TV. But let me also say this: The performative aspect of the NewsNight is what I canāt stand.
I am not saying that the showās guests donāt have genuine policy and political disagreements. What I am suggesting is that they are grossly inflating their disagreements because it makes for (and I hate this phrase) āgood TV.ā
It reminds me of the āLet Them Fight!ā meme from the Godzilla movie.
What depresses me is not that CNN has created a show aimed at watching partisans fight. CNN, like every other cable network, is not in great shape. The job of the executives is to get people to watch, and they have clearly found something with this format.
What depresses me is that people watch. Lots of people. NewsNight averages 725,000 viewers every night, including 152,000 in the coveted 25-54 demographic.
Thatās a lot of people!
Especially because no one is tuning into that show to get smarter (or anything close to it) about politics and policy. You are tuning in to watch the rhetorical sparring. To watch someone get ādunkedā on. Or āowned.ā
Which is odd to me. Because any time I talk to anyone about the current state of our political dialogue, they invariably tell me that we need less shouting. That we need to learn to disagree without being disagreeable. That to truly move beyond this broken moment in our politics, we have to stop demonizing the other side and believing that anyone who disagrees with us is, at best, a moron, and, at worst, evil.
And itās not just anecdotal. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans think our political discourse is out of controlāand want it tamped down.
What gives? I think the answer lies in one of my pet topics: The difference between who we want to be and who we actually are.
Who we want to be are the sort of people who spend our free time reading Foreign Affairs or the New York Review of Books. Who we are is the sort of people who have made the āReal Housewives,ā Kim Kardashian, and a slew of other famous-for-being-famous folks very, very rich.
And the sort of people who would elect a reality TV star president of the United States not once but twice.
This is all bad for democracy. Really bad. The more we fetishize the fights over where we disagree, the further we drift from the many things on which we all agree. The more we lose our sense of our common humanity. The easier it becomes to hate and vilify the people with whom we disagree.
And when you hate people, treating them in inhuman ways gets a lot easier.
I am not laying all of this solely at the feet of a single show on CNN. NewsNight is an effect of our awful political moment, not the cause. But in pursuit of ratings and relevance, shows like that one are actively making our already-bad political climate even more degraded.
And the worst part? We are complicit in it.
Want more ball and strike callingāno matter what uniform the batter at the plate is wearing? Check out Chris Cillizzaās Substack and YouTube channel.
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