Taking a page from TV’s reality dance competitions, CNN shamed itself Wednesday night by sponsoring a giant stunt around the president’s news conference.
Grade the president! Grade the media coverage! Grade the Senate! Grade Hillary! Grade anything you can think of, and do it in six minutes. Wolf Blitzer’s giant clock is running.
The only way the cable network could have dumbed it down further would have been to replace the alphabetical grading scale with a check, check-minus or check-plus system.
Clearly the emphasis on “interactivity,” the trend toward iReports and drawing viewers into the conversation, has spun out of control. When you goose the proceedings to feel like a cross between election night and “So You Think You Can Dance,” you’ve given in to the lowest of the lowest common denominators.
There’s a reason schools are abandoning the A-B-C grading scale. Those letter grades don’t tell you anything. The system is simplistic. It plays into preconceived ideas and puts a halt to thinking.
After CNN’s performance Wednesday night, thinking and cable news have never felt further apart.
At least Fox News stuck to traditional critiques of plans and policies, with Alan Colmes serving as Bill O’Reilly’s punching bag. And MSNBC let Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman hash out President Barack Obama’s careful wording on torture.
Pity David Gergen and Fareed Zakaria, the intellects on CNN’s panel, who looked uncomfortable handing out “report cards” on intricate matters of foreign relations. Maybe CNN’s next 100-day report card will switch to pass-fail?
