The rest of us are reduced to screaming into our sofa cushions as we flash back to that escalator in 2015, and the credulous media coverage that kick-started our apparently still-ongoing national nightmare. The only people served by this strategy are the ambitious maniacs in the right’s electoral vanguard, and the cowards and cynics who have chosen to countenance proto-fascism as a fair trade for lower taxes. Licht seems to be under the mistaken impression that what viewers want and America needs right now is a cable news network oriented around presenting a “balance” between the left and the right, something that requires pretending that today’s Republican Party is basically normal.
I have written before about why I think that this is a bad strategy, even if I get what he’s going for. He is clearly trying to restore the network’s down-the-middle reputation and win back Republican viewers. Licht, who took the reins at CNN last year, has marked his tenure by bouncing many of the network’s most vocal Trump critics while handing shows to people such as Gayle King and Charles Barkley. The discussion, moderated poorly by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, was simultaneously a triggering flashback to the bad old days of Trump’s presidency, a frustrating preview of what we can likely expect over the next 18 months, and a conclusive repudiation of CNN CEO Chris Licht’s doomed plan to restore the network’s fortunes by tacking to the imagined middle.
#DEADLY NIGHTMARE VANGUARD FULL#
He also happens to be the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and that fact was all it took for CNN to ignore literally everything else and give Trump a full hour live Wednesday night as part of a breathtakingly ill-conceived “town hall” with New Hampshire voters.
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