That's show business, baby!

The fact that I am no longer a professional journalist means I’m no longer required to watch any live press conferences, speeches, debates, or town halls by national political figures. So I skipped CNN’s Trump town hall — in fact, I relished skipping it.1 But I do want to say a few words about why it happened in the first place, and what its existence can tell us about how the news gets made.

A number of people I know were flabbergasted by CNN’s decision to let the former president broadcast a primetime infomercial on their network. Didn’t they understand what they were doing? Well, yes, they understood. They were putting on a show. And according to the Nielsen numbers — the only metric, really, that matters to CNN executives — it was an incredible show.

CNN chairman Chris Licht knew it would be. So did Trump. As the Guardian reported a couple of days after the town hall: “Trump was not particularly concerned by whether the broadcast would get high ratings, though he told CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, backstage that he would boost their ratings, to which Licht nodded and said he should have ‘a good conversation and have fun’, [sources close to Trump] said.”

And here’s Licht himself, talking to CNN staff the morning after the spectacle:

You’ll notice the above tweet got a lot of quote tweets. Many of them are about how making the news is not in fact the job of a news outlet. Journalists are supposed to report the news, not make it, according to those who were appalled by the town hall.

And yes, sure, I agree. But I also think that it’s a little beside the point to accuse CNN of committing journalist malpractice. Because, as Licht has all but explicitly told us, CNN isn’t really in the news business. It’s in the content business, the attention-farming business.

This isn’t to say that CNN doesn’t employ journalists, many of whom are quite scrupulous in their commitment to the profession’s ethical precepts. But to the extent that those people are doing journalism, their work is basically incidental to the firm’s business model. At places like CNN, journalism isn’t what pays your salary; it’s something you get away with.

As some of my readers already know, I’m writing from personal experience. Early in my career, I spent a couple of years as a digital news reporter for a rival cable news network, MSNBC; from there, I transitioned to the short-lived Al Jazeera America, Qatar’s grandiose and misbegotten attempt to eat CNN’s lunch.

Al Jazeera America was its own strange beast: a number of my colleagues there produced truly exceptional journalism, largely because no one from Doha was paying any attention to what we were doing, much less to the balance between costs and revenues.2 But MSNBC was a real business. Although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that MSNBC was an appendage to a real business.

That business was Comcast, which, right around the time I started working there, bought out Microsoft’s share of the cable news network (the “MS” in MSNBC). Comcast is a full-service content provider, offering Internet and cell service, television shows, movies, books, web-based entertainment, and so on. Cable news is a small fraction of the company’s total business: in 2021, Comcast grossed about $116 billion in revenue, of which approximately $1 billion came from MSNBC.

In an earlier post (later adapted into a letter to the editors of N+1), here’s how I described firms like NBCUniversal, the Comcast division that presides over puny little MSNBC:

The real business of these companies is not journalism anymore than it’s moviemaking. The real business is making the line go up. There are a variety of ways you can stiffen the line, but for MSNBC—again, a tiny part of the overall business—doing so generally means collecting eyeballs. More attention on your programming equals more attention on the advertising that breaks up your programming, which in turn means you can charge higher prices for access to your ad blocks. This applies, of course, to the other channels owned by Comcast: in a shareholder value sense, the main difference between Deadline: White House and Chicago P.D. is that it costs a lot less to produce an episode of the former, but the returns are also significantly lower (and the nature of the content means a slightly higher risk of controversy or litigation).

What this all means, from an editorial perspective, is that producers tend to be obsessed with chasing “good TV.” The only way to justify your existence to the higher-ups is through good ratings, and the only reliable path to good ratings is through compelling, diverting visuals. But good visuals are hard to produce in-house, especially because most cable news shows are lean, chronically understaffed operations.3

So when good TV falls into your lap, you use it. A State of the Union Address, a White House Correspondent’s Dinner, a political convention, a natural disaster, a riot: these are all good TV. But Donald Trump? The polarizing ex-president? The most famous man on the planet? The former host of a long-running reality show? That guy? He’s not good TV; he’s incredible TV.

The fact that he upsets so many people is a feature, not a bug. The same rules of “engagement” that apply to Facebook — pissing everyone off is the surest way to hold their attention — also apply to television. Which is why CNN, famously, spent much of 2016 giving Trump loads of free airtime for his campaign rallies, even going so far as to start rolling well before he trundled onto the stage. It was the most captivating show on television, and it cost CNN practically nothing to put it on the air.

Producing the Trump town hall cost a little more money than just setting up a camera at one of his rallies, but the returns were undoubtedly much, much higher. CNN’s Trump town hall, unlike the rallies, was an exclusive. People who wanted to see it live had no choice but to tune in to the network. And good TV begets good TV: now CNN can run segments on the controversy surrounding its own town hall, replete with clips of the spiciest highlights.

If this sounds excessively cynical, keep in mind that I’ve seen how it all works firsthand. One particular incident from my time at MSNBC comes to mind: a meeting for all MSNBC.com reporting and editorial staff with our good friends over in market research. There were two of them, I think, these two stylishly scruffy guys in slim fit button-downs. They were there to tell us about four composite characters who represented different types of news consumers.

One of these composite consumers was a guy around my age — a white and bespectacled beta male, like me. Let’s call him Andrew. The marketers explained that he consumed news because he was hoping to learn things. He wanted facts and data. News was a source of intellectual stimulation for him, or at least a source of arguments he could wield to prove his intelligence and erudition.

Andrew was not a core target audience for MSNBC, the marketers explained. Which was to say, I guess, that I was not a core target audience for MSNBC. My demographic wasn’t the one that cable news advertisers were interested in. Most damningly, Andrew/Ned didn’t have any brand loyalty. Instead of returning to MSNBC over and over, he was more likely to read whatever Twitter and Google served to him.

Melissa was our prime audience. Melissa was a middle-aged, smiling white lady with curly hair.4 She looked for news that would give her some sort of emotional kick, whether that be from inspiration or (more likely) outrage. She could be converted into an MSNBC loyalist. The more our content was shaped to grab Melissa’s attention, the better.

I remember that meeting largely because of how much it offended me at the time. Every news organization, I felt, should have an impenetrable firewall between its business and editorial arms. It was completely inappropriate for MSNBC to implicate us in its eyeball-farming efforts.

In hindsight, my indignation strikes me as more than a little naïve. Whatever I thought my job was, it clearly wasn’t how the people who cut my checks thought of it. I was there to mobilize attention, and judging by the CrowdTangle stats on most of my articles, I was doing a piss-poor job of it. I was writing for a version of myself, for Andrew, and thinking of it as a public service. If I wanted to earn my keep, I would have been writing for Melissa instead.5

The Trump town hall was prime Melissa content: viscerally, almost libidinally outrageous. Unsurprisingly, it was a huge success for CNN and for Trump himself. No one in the United States understands the demands of television as a medium better than the ex-president, and he proved it yet again.

Chris Licht, too, has proven his mastery of the form. (Note that immediately before taking over CNN, he was working in late night television, a format that traditionally does less to conceal its role as pure entertainment.) The problem isn’t that he misunderstood the role of cable news: it’s that we’ve misunderstood its role. Cable news is not intended as “journalism” in the stodgy, traditionalist sense, but as spectacle. It’s a malignant outgrowth of the content industry masquerading as news.

As I’ve said, professional journalists operate within the confines of this industry, and sometimes they’re able to produce high-quality journalism. But what they’re doing is fundamentally at odds with the larger project of companies like Comcast or CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery. Trying to make these monopolies “do better” for the sake of democracy is a fool’s errand. The only real solution is to dismantle them.