Go back and compare CNN reporting from today to the 1980s. And even the straight news is extremely partisan in story selection: compare the coverage of De Santis to Cuomo in 2020.[1] Plus, fully half the content on CNN (and 80% on MSNBC) is opinion.
I’m not a partisan. I spent most of my life as a registered Democrat and read the NYT every day as recently as 2012-2013. But wokeness has definitely taken over and the pretense of objectivity has been abandoned entirely.
[1] Other good examples: the “Asian hate crime” stuff. It was wall-to-wall “cultural studies” professors blaming “white supremacy” on CNN for weeks. As a card carrying asian it actually caused me to have a bit of an episode where I was questioning my own grip with reality. I literally reached out to Asians I know in NYC to be like “wait, you think this is mainly about homeless people and you want more police, right?” Like if you had just watched CNN coverage you wouldn’t even understand the forces (crime) that led to Eric Adams overwhelmingly winning the democratic nomination in NYC.
You had me until the "wokeness" stuff. I don't think we have to have the culture war to critique structural problems in cable news; these are attention-driven ad-sales businesses, and they're competing with each other to drive to extremes. As you point out, thankfully, cable news has less control over day-to-day politics than the impression you'd get from... cable news. On the ground, it's mostly Kiwanis Republicans and PTA Democrats.
Wokeness is relevant because of the aversion to doing things that are seen as compromising with systemic racism . Wokeness is uniquely willing to compromise traditional professional ethics in service of perceived higher morality. In journalism it manifests as abandoning the appearance of impartiality. E.g. the “do we call Trump racist” debate at the NYT.
As an aside, in the legal profession, it’s probably the most monumental shift in legal ethics in centuries. E.g. proposed rule 8.5 which thankfully was voted down: https://reason.com/volokh/2020/01/06/a-new-aba-model-rule-8-.... I’ve heard internal gossip from the ACLU and similar organizations where younger lawyers are rebelling against representing longstanding clients for social justice reasons. It’s really quite remarkable.
It's a lot more than gossip. Ira Glasser (founder of the ACLU for those who are not rayiner) says the organization is at risk of losing its way for exactly this reason:
It goes deeper. I’m talking about younger staff at public interest law firms rebelling against representing organizational clients squarely within the ambit of their public interest mission, because of the client’s positions on unrelated issues. Much to the consternation of stoutly liberal attorneys of the previous generation.
It’s bad. Professionals inserting their personal political views into their jobs is destroying public faith in other professions. We can’t risk the legal profession coming to be seen as yet another way for the liberal elite to tilt the very systems of society in favor of their political ideology.
There was a quip that the key innovation of Fox News was to blur distinction between its news and opinion segments.
Fox News news was traditionally (and still is, from what I can tell) actual news. What's not declared is the transition from a "news" segment to an "opinion" segment.
People who weren't around forget than CNN up until ~1995 was literally just news, 24/7. Here's what's happening in the world.
Once Fox News launched and trends became clear, all 24/7 news channels switched to a blend of news and commentary. Because that's what the market preferred.
I don't think it's simply about what the market wants. If it were, you wouldn't have the majority of opinion-masquerading-as-news channels with a similar politic bent, you'd have it about down the middle, just like the consumers in the market itself.
I think the move to opinion is more about influencing decisions of the viewership than giving them what they want. Fox started it right around 9/11 as an approach to drum up support for war, and it worked, and the rest saw how effective that was and adopted it cautiously, of course the common thread and my implication is that there are agendas that they all have that this approach helps them achieve better than just delivering information would.
I’m not a partisan. I spent most of my life as a registered Democrat and read the NYT every day as recently as 2012-2013. But wokeness has definitely taken over and the pretense of objectivity has been abandoned entirely.
[1] Other good examples: the “Asian hate crime” stuff. It was wall-to-wall “cultural studies” professors blaming “white supremacy” on CNN for weeks. As a card carrying asian it actually caused me to have a bit of an episode where I was questioning my own grip with reality. I literally reached out to Asians I know in NYC to be like “wait, you think this is mainly about homeless people and you want more police, right?” Like if you had just watched CNN coverage you wouldn’t even understand the forces (crime) that led to Eric Adams overwhelmingly winning the democratic nomination in NYC.