To Win, Fourth-Place CNN Needs to Go Lower

Amid all the chatter about Fox News vs. the White House, Fox News vs. MSNBC, MSNBC vs. Fox News, (and let's not forget the New York Post's hoped-for FBN vs. CNBC), cable news observers could almost be forgiven for forgetting little old CNN, the original 24-hour cable news network.

In fact, cable news viewers themselves clearly have forgotten about it, sending the network to last place on most nights, according to the New York Times' Bill Carter.

In October, Carter reports, Anderson Cooper, CNN's 10 p.m. host of Anderson Cooper 360° and a onetime ratings leader, fell to fourth place behind Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and CNN sister network Headline News' Nancy Grace. The latter two shows' ratings dominance over CNN are particularly galling since Olbermann's and Grace's 10 p.m. showings are reruns of their 8 p.m. episodes.

"At 10 p.m., Mr. Cooper had 211,000 viewers versus 223,000 for Mr. Olbermann’s repeat. Ms. Van Susteren had 538,000 viewers, and Ms. Grace averaged 222,000," writes Carter.

It's time for CNN to stoop to conquer. Unplug that "magic" Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall and set Cooper up with an old-fashioned blackboard à la Glenn Beck. Unmuzzle Lou Dobbs or risk losing him to Fox's Roger Ailes, with whom the New York Times' Brian Stelter reported he had dinner with recently. Dobbs has to go way nuttier than watered-down Birther speculation: Maybe be can dig into some murder-aliens-spider eggs in Bubble Yum-Paul is Dead kinda stuff. Next, Wolf Blitzer has to figure out a way to use those holograms for some sort of pundit mud-wrestling matches.

If the success of Fox News is any indication, that's how you turn a news network into a ratings hit.

That the country's media landscape has become this wildly divided is a foregone conclusion by now. It didn't have to go this way, according to the December 2007 Atlantic cover story by Andrew Sullivan headlined "Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters."

Wrote Sullivan: "At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most…. The traces of our long journey to this juncture can be found all around us. Its most obvious manifestation is political rhetoric. The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s 'Worst Person in the World' on the other…"

If Obama could have ended that war, he'd really earn the Nobel Peace Prize. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn calling Fox News "the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party" suggests the president won't end this fighting anytime soon. Alas, the battle rages on.

Hey, Anderson, better grab some chalk while you still can.