As Norm MacDonald once said, “It seems like there’s too much news. When I was a young boy, the news was half an hour; that was the whole news. A guy would come on, and he’d have a tie, and he would say the news, and it was half an hour long. Now, it’s 24 hours long. It turns out, back in the old days when it was only half an hour, they had it right. That’s about all the news there is.”
The Cable News Network debuted on Sunday, June 1, 1980, with a staff of 300. CNN became the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and was the first all-news television network in the United States. The launch set the stage for an era of rivalry and monopolization between pro-wrestling perfectionist Vince McMahon and the media mogul behind CNN, Ted Turner.
In 1988, Turner purchased McMahon’s biggest wrestling competitor, Jim Crockett Productions (JCP), renaming it World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Seven years later, WCW premiered Monday Nitro during the same time slot as McMahon’s staple World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) show, Monday Night Raw. For the majority of wrestling fans, WCW never shook its counterfeit status. Ultimately, the outfit failed due to unimaginative storylines, poor production standards, and mismanagement of talent; ceasing operations in March of 2001.
The Turner-McMahon feud spilled into a series of WWE parody skits, movies such as No Holds Barred, and newfangled wrestling angles. For example, in February of 1992, a tag team debuted called Money, Inc. It featured the Million Dollar Man (whose first name just happened to be Ted) and Irwin R. Shyster (aka I.R.S.). Their partnership lampooned the cozy relationship billionaires like Turner (and McMahon) continue to have with taxation.
This sentiment was echoed in HBO’s Succession when the fictional media magnate, Logan Roy, urged his eldest son to terminate a fringe presidential campaign centered around tax reform (“you don’t go shouting about tax; we have arrangements”). McMahon even tapped fellow oligarch Donald Trump for a “Battle of the Billionaires” storyline that culminated, not only in Wrestlemania 23’s most successful selling point, but also Linda McMahon’s tenure as the 25th administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019.
In the five years since, the good people of CNN still seem to be playing catchup with a more ruthless, Republican rival, (in this case, Fox News). According to the Pew Research Center’s Cable News Fact Sheet, CNN's total revenue decreased by 5%, from $1.9 billion in 2021 to $1.8 billion in 2022. Similarly, MSNBC's revenue fell from $977 million to $903 million, an 8% decrease. Fox News, naturally, saw a 5% increase, from $3.1 billion in 2021 to $3.3 billion in 2022.
Like WCW, CNN’s modus operandi appears to revolve around pandering to their competitor’s base, as well as poaching their talent. This was demonstrated by CNN hosting a town hall with Donald Trump the same week he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation by a federal jury; providing a platform for the adjudicated rapist to mock victims, dismiss criticisms, and grease the skids for an even more robust dismantling of the world’s oldest democratic republic.
In the days before news commentators started raging with the kind of intensity expected from people like Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and “Mean” Gene Okerlund, broadcast licensing was somewhat straightforward. In exchange for being granted a license, networks had to offer some (think of the 30 minutes invoked by MacDonald) programming that was considered to be in the public interest. The idea was that every network would have to lose some money in order to “give back” to the community before returning to our regularly scheduled programming.
Cable news, however, managed to circumvent this rule since they do not run over publicly-owned airwaves, but private satellites. Additionally, the Fairness Doctrine, which was introduced in 1949 and mandated that a variety of viewpoints be represented on broadcast news, was repealed in 1987 during the Reagan administration’s deregulation crusade.
With profit as its sole motivator, is it any surprise that CNN orchestrated a coup on June 27, 2024 in a desperate attempt to boost their ratings (which, the Daily Beast reported last month, is at a 33 year low)? Going from President Trump to President Biden was like changing the television dial from a midnight airing of Killer Klowns from Outer Space to a three and a half year C-SPAN binge. After all, Trump had been strategizing with NBC’s Mark Burnett for over a decade about how to keep audiences in suspense.
In the same vein, banking stories were often considered too tedious for public consumption before the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a law that limited the kinds of speculative risks financial institutions could make. With the abolition of those limits, banks acted more like casinos that never close. News-watching regressed into a Romanesque spectator sport that booms amid a constant barrage of controversies, firings, and scandals; not competent (i.e. boring) governance. Former media executive Leslie Moonves exemplified this posture when he admitted that, in regard to Trump’s 2016 presidential run, “it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.
Trying to get more bang for their buck, CNN invited Gavin Newsom to speak before the June Biden-Trump debate (imitating Fox News darling Sean Hannity, who interviewed Newsom immediately following the first Republican primary debate) about how old the current president is; and how well the California governor got along with the Trump administration. After all, Newsom’s ex-wife is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr. Curiously, the governor was also one of the few prominent Democratic officials not to endorse Karen Bass during her Los Angeles mayoral run, which may come as less of a surprise upon learning that Newsom and billionaire Rick Caruso (Bass’s main rival for mayor) employ the same consultancy firm.
The commentators in charge of CNN’s pre and post-debate coverage caterwauled like fantasy football fans; each one spouting shock, outrage, and disbelief while pressuring the Democratic Party establishment to put the sitting president on probation. It was like watching an episode of The Apprentice, wondering when the declarative catchphrase (“you're fired!”) will manifest. Van Jones (who, like Biden, served under Barack Obama) was all set to throw President Biden under the bus. Likewise, debate co-moderator Jake Tapper (who refused to challenge a single one of Trump’s 602 lies) claimed to have a cavalcade of governors reaching out to him throughout the night, all rallying for Biden to resign.
So was Norm right about there being “too much news?” In just nine days following the debate, the New York Times ran 192 stories on the subject of replacing Biden. Contrast that with their coverage of the Biden administration’s initiative to conserve 30 percent of the nation’s lands, waters, and ocean by 2030. Radical differences in spending priorities have been equally ignored. Case in point: according to Yahoo! Finance, the largest recipients of funds approved by the 2021 Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act (when measured per capita) are Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming (four states that Biden lost by at least 10 points in 2020). Whereas the previous administration pushed to punish blue states.
A particularly ironic twist is that the same media still widely regarded as having a “liberal” bias, has not bothered to amplify Biden’s most progressive successes; such as being the first president to appoint a Native American to his cabinet (the Secretary of Interior, no less), the first to join a picket line (while Trump trash-talked unions and rallied with scabs), the first to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, efforts to curtail our dependence on China while rebuilding American manufacturing with the CHIPS and Science Act (also the the most robust changes to the Buy American Act in almost 70 years), expanding healthcare to millions of veterans via the PACT Act, getting Mexico to invest $1.5 billion toward a smart wall, ending the family separation policy, and cutting the child poverty rate in half.
Not to mention being the first POTUS in history to travel into an active war zone (which he did twice; both in Ukraine and Israel). Perhaps Biden should call on the New York Times to drop out of journalism. Considering they’ve been around for 173 years, isn’t it time to step aside and make way for more competent leadership? The punditocracy did not call for Trump to step down when he didn’t know his own wife’s name, confused Obama with Biden (nor Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley, nor Obama with Hillary Clinton), nor when he kept referring to being in Texas at an Arizona rally.
There has been no clarion call for the GOP to replace their nominee after he revealed secret documents to enemies of the United States, nor his hosting of Holocaust deniers at Mar-a-Lago, nor his desire to execute American citizens for possessing large amounts of drugs; including cannabis (claiming that similar laws in China and Singapore “tamped down violent crime”). This is another stark difference from the current administration, which has eased restrictions on cannabis (rescheduling it from a Schedule I narcotic to Schedule III status), pardoned many federal cannabis offenses, and ended federal funding for private (for-profit) prisons.
Mike Pence asserts, on the day Trump sicced an insurrectionist mob to “hang Mike Pence,” that his access badge was deactivated, did not recognize the secret service driver who arrived to chauffeur the vice president (“I’m not getting in that car”), and had to go into hiding with his family for several months following the attack on the capitol. Chuck Grassley, the senior-most senator, made an ominous statement on January 5, 2021 claiming that he, and not Vice President Pence, will preside over the certification of Electoral College votes, since “We don’t expect him to be there.” Yet, the individuals who constructed and transported the gallows (with which Pence was to be hanged) have never been identified. Furthermore, although Pence has not endorsed Trump’s reelection bid, he has also not called on his party to replace Trump with a non-felon.
It is apparent that the mainstream media misses the kind of ratings that they had with Trump in office, so this whole “will Biden stay in?“ narrative is probably the best clickbait that they’re going to get before our eventual return to normalcy. There will still be efforts to bring in new and shiny distractions; whether it’s at the top of Hulu‘s homepage, or a bombardment of calls for governors as young and obscure as Wes Moore to take the helm of the most prolific presidential administration since Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The media always benefits from a horse race, but to bypass Kamala Harris as the obvious successor, should Biden need to step away, would break a party whose most solid and reliable base is Black women. And as impressive as Newsom did in the recall election (winning 67% in an off-year), Article 12 of the Constitution prevents running mates from being from the same state. An upgrade for Pete Buttigieg, who is already in Biden’s cabinet as Secretary of Transportation, would be the more sensible solution as Harris’s VP.
Perhaps Norm was offering more of a guideline; a suggested dosage to get the most out of your news without the side effects of hate-watching, brainwashing, and burnout. There is certainly a preponderance of clickbait, tabloids, and pandering; but also a lack of genuine, relevant reporting. Nevertheless, Public Enemy’s 1988 advice is bound to continue coming in handy as the punditocracy milks every last drop out of this debate (about a debate): “don’t believe the hype.”