CNN: Veering right and aiming low

Digging through Gary Condit's tabloid trash and courting Rush Limbaugh, is the venerable all-news network playing catch-up to the Fox News Channel?

By Eric Boehlert

Sep 5, 2001 |

For CNN, the struggling all-news network anxious to jump-start its ratings, President Bush delivered a welcome gift on the night of Aug. 9, when he opted to address the nation live in prime time to announce his decision about federal funding for stem cell research.

At least for that evening, CNN would be on the news front lines, rounding up experts to discuss a complicated issue of national concern. Yet there was something odd about CNN's coverage that night; in what may have been a first for the network, not one member of the president's opposition party was interviewed on the air for his or her reaction after the address.

Instead, for two hours CNN presented Bush advisor Karen Hughes, conservative Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Sam Brownback, Dr. James Dobson, founder of the conservative group Focus on the Family, Bush Cabinet member Tommy Thompson, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, conservative commentator Tony Blankley, conservative Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and the conservative deputy director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Not only did no Democratic elected officials appear on screen, but CNN didn't present one Democratic-leaning pollster, consultant or columnist to utter a stern word in protest. (And don't blame the Democrats -- according to a party official, "there was no conscious decision to keep anybody off the air" that night.)

For some reason it fell to a few nonpartisan doctors and entertainers, such as Mary Tyler Moore, Montel Williams and Christopher Reeve, to deliver muted criticisms of Bush's stem cell decision.

For those looking for evidence that CNN, rattled by the surge in ratings for Fox News, was skewing to the right, the evidence that night seemed clear. Days earlier Walter Isaacson, the new chairman and chief executive of CNN, had visited exclusively with Republican leaders of Congress in a reported attempt to patch up relations with stalwart conservatives. Was CNN now trying to dispel the perception that it was, by any stretch of the imagination, "liberal"?

But ramping up the percentages of on-air conservative pundits and Republican flacks may not be the only prong in CNN's comeback campaign. Taking its cue from the Bush-cheerleading Fox, it is also imitating the new kid in town in a fashion that could only put a smile on the face of Fox's founder, Rupert Murdoch, the king of the screaming headline. The all-news network, for most of the summer, suddenly became the all-Chandra Levy network.

So is CNN going tabloid and sucking up to conservatives in order to play catch-up with Fox? CNN says no. "CNN since about 1990 has been in an extremely competitive environment," says Sid Bedingfield, executive vice president and general manager of CNN U.S. "And the way to win viewers is to do the best and most compelling journalism out there. That's the mandate we're reacting to."

Whether or not CNN is veering to the right will be a never-ending topic of debate for media pundits. But anyone who watched the network this summer could hardly fail to notice that CNN also doesn't mind occasionally aiming for the bottom. With the Chandra Levy story, the network struck double gold: a tawdry story with a Democratic Congressman involved that longtime Clinton critics, like Barbara Olson, just can't get enough of. It's all about the numbers. Fox's ratings are growing at a heady clip; CNN's are not.

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