Noah Rothman writes at National Review Online about one particularly telling assessment of the firing of CNN honcho Brian Lichr.
Many such offerings attributed the Licht-led network’s troubles to structural factors, the boss’s detachment from the day-to-day, and ambitious but destabilizing business ventures that didn’t pan out. One of the more intellectually honest efforts to explain CNN’s travails was penned by Washington Post opinion writer Perry Bacon Jr., who crystalized not only the problem afflicting this network but all news media in a tidy theory of everything: the press is just too darn centrist.
As Bacon notes, Licht assumed his position operating under the flawed assumption that he had taken control of a news outlet rather than an institution dedicated to providing a service to a narrow constituent group. In his role, he admonished journalists to “not virtue signal. Tell the truth. Ask questions getting at the truth.” The cad.
Licht also encouraged skepticism and the critical evaluation of the perspectives reinforced by the social biases dominant on America’s coasts. That is where it all went wrong, according to Bacon.
“Licht’s comments embody an anti-woke centrism that is increasingly prominent in American media and politics today, particularly among powerful White men who live on the coasts and don’t identify as Republicans or conservatives,” Bacon wrote. “By anti-woke, what I mean is skepticism of progressive causes and ideas, especially on issues of gender, race and sexuality.”
This is a valuable contention because it is a falsifiable premise. Its validity can be tested. …
… If all this is what passes for “skepticism of progressive causes and ideas,” we can at least see why the occasional executive emerges from obscurity now and then to rein in the herd instincts that dominate the media monolith. Or, rather, you could if you weren’t reflexively hostile to even the rote and perfunctory inclusion of a sentence or two explicating conservative objections to this practice, if only to bury them under great heaps of sanctimony and fallacious argumentation.
