CNN, in a laughable attempt to boost its ratings, has attempted to dress up a couple of its broadcasts in podcast trappings — based on the misguided notion that viewers will be attracted to the new form rather than the losing substance of what journalists such as Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper are saying. As an inevitable result, such a desperate move has been the object of widespread mockery. What is interesting is this mockery is not only coming from the right but even from left leaning media such as the New Yorker.
Jay Caspian Kang who is himself a podcaster with the Time to Say Goodbye podcast turned his professional eye on the CNN effort via the New Yorker on Tuesday with “CNN’s ‘Podcast Look’ and the Slow Death of Cable News.” Despite any political sympathy that Kang might feel for CNN, his professional podcaster side couldn’t help but laugh at what that desperate network is doing:
Last week, CNN rolled out some experiments in form and in manufactured authenticity. Anderson Cooper wore his sleeves rolled up for a roundtable discussion among a clutter of clunky microphones on a desk; Jake Tapper recorded a show from his home office, near a clothes rack of dress shirts and blazers, and talked about bringing viewers to the actual desk where he and his team do their journalism.
The impression wasn’t particularly subtle—someone had obviously suggested that the network try to make its shows look more like the podcasts that millions of people now watch on YouTube or see clips of on TikTok and Instagram—and it certainly didn’t succeed in making CNN come across as more trustworthy or natural, which was presumably the goal. It felt like watching Ronald Reagan take off his shirt, paint on some jeans, and start screaming like Jello Biafra. The podcast industry’s currency, deservedly or otherwise, is oppositional: people don’t listen to Joe Rogan because they think he’s better at his job than CNN; they do it because they hate CNN.
The podcast aesthetic—casual, long-winded, sometimes profane—directly opposes, perhaps not coincidentally, the sterility and bizarre right-this-minute quality of cable news, on which everything seems incomplete and therefore manipulative, and yet somehow endless. The visual style of podcasts is purely functional, with the pandemic-inspired appearance of remote work: people are talking at you from boxes on your screen.
Kang points out that CNN is even out of sync with the podcasts it is trying to emulate because podcasting has evolved in the past few years from its original simplicity: “podcasts have trended toward what we can loosely call professionalization, which made CNN’s recent effort even odder.”
Kang concludes with the absurdity of CNN trying to dress some of its broadcasts up as podcasts:
If CNN’s flirtation with podcast fashion is a bellwether for the news industry, it’s not because of what it tells us about cable networks or legacy media companies. After all, CNN has rolled out poorly conceived and wildly derivative online products for the past thirty years. The problem with all these projects is an old and recurring one: you can’t dress up like a revolutionary when you’re the reason that the revolution is kicking off.
…you can’t really fake the insurrectionary energy, or its aesthetic. You just have to hope your audience grows old with you, before you give way to whatever comes next…
Perhaps Jake Tapper could do a podcast with Jay Caspian Kang on why so many people are mocking him and CNN for attempting to boost ratings via the podcast shtick.
