On the evening of June 5, as Journalist Twitter entered a fourth straight day of industry gossip over Tim Alberta's 15,000-word Atlantic profile of embattled CNN Chairman Chris Licht (whose tenure would finally be euthanized June 7), I did something that fewer and fewer people—including those in the middle of that discussion—bother to do anymore: I watched a lot of CNN.
It can be jarring, to put it mildly, to observe the chasm between highfalutin notions about "the proper function of journalism in a fractured democracy" (as former Reliable Sources anchor Brian Stelter framed the Licht debate in New York magazine), and CNN's actual programming. On that night the network's lead story, hour after calorie-free hour, was that an unnamed source "familiar" with the investigation into former president Donald Trump's mishandling of classified documents indicated that "at least one witness has been asked by prosecutors" about whether a pool-maintenance employee at Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound intentionally flooded "a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept."
