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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/15/2003 12:45:23 PM PST by Davis
Wowee, Walter Isaacson resigned the top job at CNN, to be effective after the fall of Saddam expected early in the spring.
So what, you say. It's important to me, his resignation, because here's a guy with an immense reputation, former managing editor at Time, prestigious biographer, clearly a man of achievement, ability, and yet he couldn't figure out what to do with a thoroughly professional world wide news organization in order to meet the competition of Fox News Channel.
There doesn't seem to be any question that during his two years at CNN, Isaacson was looking down his nose at TV journalism. A branch of show biz, you see, no depth, no intellectual rigor. All a question of scenery, lighting, splashy graphics, and good-looking chicks reading the news. He's escaping to go off to Colorado as chief of Aspen Institute, a liberal public policy think tank. Prolly a good career choice.
Not only did Isaacson disappoint his bosses at CNN, Ted Turner's contribution to the AOL Time Warner tzimmes; he disappointed the people working under him; Isaacson also disappointed Senator Tom Daschle, Al Gore, Barbra Streisand, to name a few chosen at random.
All these people were joined by other sachems of the Democratic party in a search for a counterweight to the Fifth Column (according to Al Gore) who take their marching orders from the Republican National Committee: Fox News Channel, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Times, Oh yes, Talk Radio and Rush Limbaugh.
Apparently, it has never occurred to Isaacson or any of these other chaps that what they're seeing is not a failure of the messenger but of the message itself.
It is likewise evident that the one thing Isaacson did not see fit to pay attention to was news content, the selection of newsworthy events, that is, events (and opinions about events) that viewers were interested in learning about. He and the others have disconnected with a significant proportion of America. Beyond this, CNN, like the political Left it represents, just isn't fun.
The lack of joy on the Left has been gathering steam for some time now. I've discussed it before in these pages and attributed it to the open and notorious failure of Marxian Socialism. Is there anything more discouraging than seeing one's lifelong faith-investment turn sour?
The moral and intellectual disarray of Socialism has left the Left without a central core of belief. It has dissolved into a mishmash of attitudes, many of which appear to most Americans to be absurd. Thus, starting with a demand for toleration of private sexual behavior, it has evolved into condemning the Boy Scouts for rejecting homosexual Scoutmasters. A Press that looks solemnly and approvingly at such an attitude has lost touch with its audience.
Always rigid, the Left has drawn in so much that Christopher Hitchens, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, who still describes himself as a man of the Left but is nimble and intelligent, is able to see that the Left is desperate to hang on, to preserve the status quo, to despise change, any change. With black and Latino public schools a nightmare of failure, the Left refuses to consider any change, but simply demands more of the same. A Press that doesn't notice this, doesn't dig at it critically is irrelevant and not worth watching.
The uncritical daily trotting out of Leftist attitudes goes one step further than irrelevance. It becomes a slap in the face of a vast number of Americans. Among the weapons these Americans have are the ballot box and the TV remote.
The part of the Press that notes, for instance, the anti-American imbecilities of Senator Patty Murray of Washington State and repeatedly plays a video tape of them--Fox News Channel is doing this--will earn an audience while the rest who are mute are bound to lose ratings and CEOs.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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