"Don't Cry for CNN" -- that's the headline atop Michael Hirschorn's elegiac piece on CNN in New York mag. Hirschorn is too kind to CNN, in not noting its relentless liberalism. But still, it's an interesting read. Heres's an excerpt:
But CNN’s biggest problem may actually be its founding principles. In an era when news flows like water—available everywhere, all the time, instantly—a network devoted to providing headlines topped with a touch of analysis no longer seems quite so useful. If anything, sitting down for 22 minutes to watch a middlebrow mix of politics and weather that’s too proud to dabble more than passingly in the latest Hollywood crack-whoredom seems … inefficient. What was very urgent in 1980 or on 9/11 no longer seems crucial when we’re drowning in news. CNN’s decline may be, in Wall Street analyst-speak, secular as opposed to cyclical.
In this case, "secular as opposed to cyclical" means terminal.
