I’ve been a huge fan of CNN since it’s inception. I’m so old I remember when HLN was Headline News and presented non-stop 30 minute newscasts to supplement CNN’s long form news coverage. I’ve also been on CNN as a talking moderate head and CNN is the most listened to station on my XM Radio dial when I travel.
But CNN was target of some great jokes at the Gridiron. And who’d ever think of Secretary of State John Kerry as a great standup comedian?
Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a knife to the heart of CNN during Saturday night’s address at the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the white-tie-and-tails event hosted by Washington’s most prestigious press group.
During a humorous and well-received speech, Kerry, the evening’s headliner, said that CNN’s John King had asked if the former Massachusetts Senator was considering another presidential bid in 2016.
Kerry’s response: “I am out of politics — and based on the ratings, so is CNN.”
And then there was former Gov. Charlie Crist, the Democratic speaker, who also found great material in CNN’s ratings problems:
“You know things are bad at CNN when they say they may go to a print edition,” Crist said…
CNN’s woes reflect the times. It’s trying to offer more traditional journalism and political analysis at a time when American is hugely polarized and many people like to go to a channel where they get a viewpoint and perspective they already agree with in advance that is a partisan one. And so Fox News’s ratings boom begat MSNBC increasingly offering itself as the anti-Fox News. One unabashedly veers to the right, one unabashedly veers to the left. And CNN tries to occupy the center which politicians and parties these days can be difficult to do or damaging in a world where partisans hunger for confrontation, defining and blaming.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.