http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/jay-rosen-is-the-leave-it-there-era-ending-at-cnn_b74633This piece is titled "Is the 'Leave it There' Era Ending at CNN?"
It's a story about Mark Whitaker, who used to be the Washington bureau chief at MSNBC and departed for CNN awhile back, to take the newly-created position of executive vice president and managing editor at CNN Worldwide. He left just as Comcast was taking over NBC et al. NYU’s Jay Rosen, on what he means when he talks about CNN leaving it there, from Mediabistro, July 5th:
(snip)
Leave the partisan fights to the guests: sounds great. Until you think about it for a minute. And really, that’s all it takes: about a minute. In a hyper-polarized environment like the one we increasingly have in the U.S. these fights have long since broken the borders of opinion. They now routinely break out over matters of fact. (Example: does cutting Federal tax rates increase revenues to the government?)
(snip)
In other words, you could have a situation where in order to do your duty journalistically, you have to take sides and say, “I’m sorry, Senator, but that simply doesn’t square with what we know.” Soon as you do that, your mantra, “We cover both sides but don’t favor either side” starts working against you. He then moves on to the meat of his post: the NPR interview with CNN executive VP Mark Whitaker. Rosen notes that Whitaker essentially says the “leave it there” segments need to end at the channel. In the post and a subsequent comment, Rosen explains what he believes the important takeaway is:
The new boss at CNN acknowledges the pattern and says: we’re not going to do that any more. Will this change anything? I have no idea. We could find in a year’s time that CNN is leaving it there just as much as it ever did. Or we might discover that the small beachhead Anderson Cooper established has widened and started to become part of the CNN style.
From a comment at the bottom of the post:
Part of the reason I wrote this piece is so that the media beat reporters–Brian Stelter, Jeremy Peters and David Carr of the New York Times, Howard Kurtz of Newsbeast, Michael Calderone of Huff Post, Keach Hagey of Politico, David Folkenflik of NPR, the people at TV Newser–now know they have a pledge, a promise from the boss, to hold CNN to. Jay Ackroyd: One possible way CNN could react to Whitaker’s pledge was provided by Al Jazeera during the Egyptian revolution. A number of American viewers, tuning into the AJ for the first time or flipping back and forth between it and CNN, noticed something: Hey, no talking heads! More reporting! And when they have an official on the air and he bullshits, they go in for the kill… Wow.
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This last part - "...and when they have an official on the air and he bullshits, they go in for the kill..." BINGO! Mark Whitaker evidently started bringing in the notion that the flabby old cop-out "well, we'll have to leave it there," where some asshole statement from some idiot teabagger talking head or some such is simply allowed to stand, rather than being challenged and dismantled for being the unfounded, narrow-minded ideological crap-spew it is.
Maybe they're starting to catch on - it is NOT urgently necessary that you make room for all views no matter how lame, ill-advised, and downright dangerous some of them are. You do NOT have to feel compelled or honor-bound to make a space at the table for the Flat-Earth Society every time you bring on somebody from NASA, for example.
At least I HOPE this is true. CNN could use a little "keeping them honest" treatment for itself and its on-air presentation.
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