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Jeff Zucker

Wolff: Can these faces save CNN?

Michael Wolff
USA TODAY
Jeremy Paxman, a British broadcaster, on May 19, 2014, in London, England.

How to fix CNN is one of those enduring media puzzles that just might, it sometime seems, nag forever at true news believers. Shouldn't there be a way to create strong, intelligent, informative news that a significant audience might find compelling?

Jeff Zucker, CNN's ambitious chief and as tactical a television mind as exists, seems in many ways to have concluded that there probably isn't.

To an ever and ever greater degree, cable news is about sliver audiences— even Fox News averages only a million viewers a night — targeted to melodramatic or campy political sensibilities. In the case of CNN, which tries to rise above single-bore politics, its specialty is the melodramatic and campy news event— the ever-missing plane —that draws the ever-declining news audience.

This reflects a problem with the cable audience — it's overly fixated, if not fetishistic.

But it may also reflect a problem with cable news talent.

The very idea of what we used to call a television broadcaster, charismatic and authoritative, has been lost — with, arguably, Barbara Walters, retiring last month at 84, being the last living example in America.

The nadir of television gravitas may be Ronan Farrow on MSNBC. He's a third-rate movie plot: The child anchor, self-serious and mimicking the adults, finding himself, through happenstance and cynical television logic, embarrassingly on the air.

And then there is Piers Morgan, whose show went off the air in March. His painful discomfort with the role, and yet sweaty and desperate determination to play the part, should give anybody pause about thinking they might survive in the chair. Nobody survives, not intact.

A corollary to this is that nobody wants to go on television to be interviewed anymore — and television news is an interview medium. In part, this is because anybody large enough for an interview understands he or she will be reduced by the low stature of the people interviewing them. It's the cable curse.

Now ambitious television talent wants another job. The savvy want to be Anthony Bourdain. That's the most frequent pitch in the business: To be the Anthony Bourdain of…heath, technology, art, war…fill in the blank.

He is a post-news newsman. And gradually he is becoming the face of the new non-news CNN. Indeed, quite a better face than its struggling anchors and hoary correspondents.

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown is news for people who don't want news. After all, cooking is his subject — arguably, a much more emotionally satisfying lens through which to see the world than the disconnection and anger of politics.

And Bourdain's job is so much more enviable than having to show up every day to sit on a depressing cable set. Bourdain is now the ultimate foreign correspondent, footloose in the world, working hard to put his series in the can, then enjoying life. He's escaped real time.

And yet, he seems realer than his phony counterparts doing live shows. His is, of course, news as reality television.

Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and author,  in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2010.

In a sense, Bourdain is a throwback to that once-prevalent form, the magazine news show. Even in the heyday of television news, the talking head became stultifying and needed to be balanced by a larger, more dramatic and cinematic world. Hence, Dateline's long run.

But the problem with magazine shows, and why they never made it in cable and, indeed, the problem with Bourdain's show, is that they are expensive, whereas talking heads are not.

The Bourdain show has been a hit on CNN, and respite from the lost plane, but in order for it to make money for CNN, it has to be repeated many times, ideally, endlessly. CNN, in other words, has to become the Discovery Channel — and it is clearly trying to.

But what about the news? What about reasonable and intelligent voices? A strong and engaging narrator? A conversation lightening rod for the rest of us?

And, more specifically, what about the 9:00 p.m. hour?

As I say, this desire to restore CNN to some aspect of what it really never was and what, anyway, it is not going to be again — an assertive and authentic news source — continues against all logic. But here is my suggestion.

Jeremy Paxman is the most famous broadcaster in Britain, a legendary interviewer and indomitable figure and, after many years, he has just, restlessly, left his job as the host of the BBC show Newsnight after 25 years. Yes, yes, there are the obvious dangers, after Morgan, of another English accent on CNN. A bad fumble, Piers. But Paxman is the real thing. What news needs, what it cannot coherently exist without, is authority. Two generations of cable news have pretty much wiped that out in America. So it probably has to be imported. With Paxman its withering authority. With vast superiority and haughtiness, which, of course, television executives undoubtedly believe will turn off an uncomprehending American audience.

On the other hand, some pitiless intelligence might be a cure. In contrast to Farrow and the gargoyles and the blah and the bland of cable, a figure like Paxman could be electrifying — please, find him on YouTube and send a note to CNN — and television news might seem quick, astute and knowing again.

Of course, it is too late for that. Still, the 9:00 hour on CNN is open.

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