2023-05-15 07:38:13
The American media are looking for a new political identity. The presidential election is only eighteen months away, but they have already entered the pre-election campaign. The most obvious example has just been given, at its expense, by CNN, which had invited Donald Trump for a live debate with spectators from New Hampshire on Wednesday evening.
Accused of being too openly pro-democratic in recent years, CNN has lost audiences, which the channel intends to win back by opening up more to the opposition. But the steering wheel was violent: the channel is now widely criticized for having offered the former president a broad platform to repeat lies regarding the 2020 election. The public was also largely won over to him.
Debate with Donald Trump
“You have every right to be outraged today, to be angry and never watch this channel once more. But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person disappear? “responded Anderson Cooper, one of CNN’s star hosts. “If the show must have shown something, it is (that Donald Trump) has not changed, and that he is throwing himself headlong” into the election, he tried to demine.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Fox News has the same concern. After agreeing to pay $787 million to settle the case for its lies regarding the 2020 election result, the channel fired its star columnist, the very conservative Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson migrates to Twitter
And it is now Twitter that hopes to take advantage of it: the polemicist, who obviously cannot immediately monetize his talents on a competing channel, has announced that he will very soon be relaunching his daily show… on the social network. “You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true,” he said. The operation might nevertheless be at risk for Twitter, whose acquisition by Elon Musk has already scared away advertisers.
Media staffs are under pressure. At CNN, which laid off following the failed launch of its CNN+ streaming service, new executive Chris Licht is already frail. “How Licht and other CNN executives respond to these criticisms in the days and weeks to come will be critical,” even judged the channel’s media columnist, Oliver Darcy, on his blog.
On the occasion of the quarterly results of Fox Corp, its CEO Lachlan Murdoch intends on the other hand to trace its furrow. “There is no change in the programming strategy of Fox News […] Clearly this is a successful strategy and as always we are adjusting our programming and offering, and we continue to do so,” he evaded.
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