With the final airing of CNN’s long-running “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter, his network — and cable TV news stations in general — should prepare themselves to slip further into national irrelevance.
After nine years of intelligent, unsparing analysis of mass media convulsions, Stelter was informed last week that his show was being cancelled.
On Sunday, Aug. 21, it was good night and good luck.
Those last five words were Edward R. Murrow’s famous sign-off. If Murrow, the revered CBS newsman who set most of broadcast journalism’s highest standards, were alive today, this would kill him.
Stelter, 36, was a student at Towson University who started his own television and cable news blog, TV Newser, from his campus dormitory. The New York Times was so impressed, the paper snatched him up when the ink wasn’t even dry on his diploma. Stelter spent the next six years there, breaking one big media story after another.
He developed sources everywhere, and his energy was boundless. He took the Times media coverage where it had never gone before.
So CNN, offering money that the ink-stained wretches of print journalism only dream about, snatched him up nine years ago.
Now, the station’s top execs say they want to go “in a different direction.”
That’s a good idea, except that it was Stelter and his Sunday morning crew who were giving journalism a rare sense of precisely where it has lost its direction and why so few people are watching anymore.
You want numbers? A week ago, the Times reported that CNN’s average viewership during prime time this quarter is 639,000.
During prime time.
That’s 27 percent lower than a year ago. MSNBC’s ratings are slightly better, but their prime-time numbers are down 23 percent.
Then there’s Fox, universally regarded as a ratings success. After all, they draw a couple million viewers during prime time.
Let’s see: roughly two million Fox viewers.
In a nation of roughly 350 million people.
That means, by simple math, 348 people out of every 350 people all across America are not watching Fox.
And Fox is considered the big success in cable TV news.
So yes, good night and good luck.
Why aren’t we watching? Maybe because we know what the big three cable outfits will tell us each day before they even open their mouths.
With CNN and MSNBC, it’s Donald Trump all the time. Is Trump an important story? Are his actions historically dangerous and repugnant? Yes and yes.
But he’s not the only story, and CNN and MSNBC need to stress some other important stories in their search for viewers.
Fox is the opposite. If there’s a story showing the law closing in on Trump, count on Fox to pretend they didn’t hear about it or minimize it, or to mock those who do bring us the latest disturbing news about the former president.
All three news operations have become utterly predictable in what they’ll cover or refuse to cover, and their editorial take on it.
And that’s why Brian Stelter’s loss will be profound. Every Sunday, he and his crew cast a sharp, unsparing eye on today’s media, even if it meant criticizing CNN. (And just for the record, the show’s ratings were higher than MSNBC’s in that Sunday morning hour.)
Stelter’s work will now echo like a cry for help for an industry drowning in its increasing irrelevance.
Or as Murrow might have said of cable news, “Good night, and good luck.”
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