You might think that CNN's major competition is other cable news networks--you know, such as Fox and MSNBC.
But if you thought that, you'd be wrong, according to the latest spin from CNN prexy Jon Klein. Whatever made you think that CNN worried about television? CNN has other, bigger, fish to fry. Such as Facebook--look out, Facebook, CNN is coming atcha!
As reported by George Szalai, in The Hollywood Reporter, Klein is now saying, "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites," because they provide "an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."
So ignore the fact, Klein is saying, that CNN is now third, fourth, or fifth in the cable news ratings. That's not a problem, Klein has been spinning for years now, because, well, you know, it's not a problem. Nobody except Time-Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes seems to buy Klein's spin, but if he, Bewkes, signs Klein's checks, Klein's focus-on-an-audience-of-one strategy must be given some grudging respect, albeit not by Time-Warner shareholders.
"Viewers and ratings are just one metric that CNN looks at," Szalai writes of Klein's argument. Gee, I seem to recall the days when CNN bragged that it was Number One in cable news ratings, or when Ted Turner said that his goal was to "squash Rupert [Murdoch and Fox News] like a bug." But now that Fox is squashing CNN like a bug, the rules have changed. Now, CNN is looking past plain old cable news, toward the bright new world of digital.
Yet interestingly, Klein's own words suggest that Klein doesn't buy his own spin. When called upon to defend CNN's performance, the CNN man still cites TV first, as we see in this quote:
For example, Klein argued that CNN has "hands-down the best TV journalism," is the biggest news brand internationally and is "number one by a mile in digital," both online and in mobile. "We think of ourselves as No. 1," Klein summarized.
"We think of ourselves as No, 1." Now there's some chutzpah!
But we might further note that if Klein first cites CNN-as-TV when he is defending his "digital strategy"--as when he said, "hands-down the best TV journalism"--then that's evidence that Klein knows better than to pretend that TV doesn't matter. But The Cable Gamer has no doubt that Klein will perfect his spin soon enough. He will soon be saying, smoothly, with Alfred E. Neuman-ish nonchalance, "We never saw ourselves as a TV network. We were always a digital platform. What me worry about TV? What's TV? Don't you know anything about media?"
Such spin will be as comical as Mad Magazine, of course. But if Bewkes keeps buying it, Klein will have made a career-extending sale.
