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Ellis Weiner's avatar

Excellent piece. What I don't understand is Licht's business rationale. His job is not to assure that the news is reported fairly and accurately. It's to maximize viewership and ad dollars. Why does he think pandering to Trump and MAGA is going to increase eyeballs? MAGA won't watch CNN--they won't even watch Fox News if it strays from strict fascism. This makes a rightist CNN a right-wing spoiler, drawing a (relatively) few viewers to itself so that no one--not Fox; not Newsmax; not ONAN (sic); not CNN--gets enough. This is what Keith Olbermann mocks--"Increase ad revenue by decreasing viewership."

Missing from this piece (although implicitly haunting it) is the crucial, one could even say existential, distinction between truth and lies. Whenever Licht, Anderson Cooper, or anyone else chides liberals for not "listening to both sides," they should be sharply smacked and sent to their room without dessert, because Trump's "side"--an endless cloud of lies--is not a side at all.

With regard to any argument, falsehoods do not embody an alternate political position. In this regard, at least, Trump makes it easy on everyone. Everything he says pubicly (and, for all I know, privately), is a lie. Literally everything. Which means the proper response to whatever he says is not to *evaluate* it, but to swat it aside. If that means he should not be interviewed at all, that's a defensible position. If you must interview him, then to each of his answers you must say, "No, that's false. The truth is, X. Now, next question..." CNN's problem is not that they don't know this. It's that they know this but don't care.

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Beth McLaughlin's avatar

Finally, a valuable and realistic opinion piece. Thanks for this.

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