There was a time a few years ago when I couldn’t go two days without knocking around CNN President Jon Klein. My general irritation with the media – and my specific disappointment with CNN – was peaking, and Klein became my whipping boy (nullus!) for an interminable series of interviews he gave to media reporters where he promised to get the cable news original back on track by getting away from coverage of Missing White Women and car chases and returning to hard news. His words:

“We’re rollicking, aggressive pursuers of facts. No one else does that. Plenty of people talk about that. We’re the only ones who go out and report the news.”
[…]
“Our editorial chops are alive and well,” he said. “We’re kicking butt everyday. The American people want serious news — and they’re not getting enough of it from cable.”
[…]
“We have a policy — don’t cover car chases,” he said. “We are the most essential source of information for Americans. We’ve aligned all of our day parts to be the newsy alternatives.”

So Klein, in trying to make the case for his network, went around telling media people what they wanted to hear, and signaling to everyone else that he could tell the difference between news and schlock. But at every opportunity, CNN continued to ignore actual news in favor of…car chases and crime porn.

And when looking in the mirror became unbearable, Klein would just take another interview tour lamenting his own network’s poor editorial decisions:

CNN has given too much play to Michael Jackson’s 31/2-month child-molestation trial, says its president.

“If I had one decision to take back, it would be the extent of our coverage,” says CNN/U.S. chief Jon Klein, six months on the job. “Looking back, we should have just covered the beginning and the end.”
[…]
“We committed to a reporter and crew there every single day,” Klein says. “I have not found it to be a very satisfying meal. CNN ought to do stories nobody else has. We did what everybody else did. It was the safe thing to do.”

In terms of news value, the case “wasn’t even close to being the biggest priority,” Klein says. In the future, “we will be a lot more careful about committing to ongoing coverage.”

It’s not Klein’s fault that the concentration of the media in the hands of corporate monoliths has changed the news game. He didn’t invent quarterly profit reports or shareholder demands for return on investment. He knows that his job (eventually anyway) will be judged on the basis of advertising rates, demographics, and ratings. But how Klein has chosen to operate in the environment he inherited is, at bottom, reprehensible. At any time, Klein could have made the decision to simply keep his word and actually require that CNN producers cover important news. That he hasn’t is his fault, and will be his legacy.

There are important events taking place, and not just in Iraq where CNN has, with the exception of Michael Ware, fallen down on the job. Klein’s choice to chase after ratings hasn’t helped, and has only served to tarnish his network’s reputation. Poll after poll reveals that the American public is more interested in issues that affect them directly, yet CNN‘s domestic coverage is light on issues like the housing market, the real economy, the effects of the Bush administration’s six years in power, and heavy on celebrity trials, fires, crashes, car chases (still) and Missing White Women (still.) Though he has 24 hours to fill every day, Klein sees fit to repeat rather than report. It wouldn’t be any less productive, but it would be a whole lot less annoying without Klein describing his thoughts on what CNN is and does. Especially when his description sounds exactly nothing like the CNN my cable company carries.

I bring all of this up today for two reasons. The first is the fact that I watched Bill Moyers‘ Buying the War special on PBS on Wednesday. You can (and should by all means) watch it or read the transcript. There’s not really anything in it that is going to come as news to anyone who reads this or any number of other liberal blogs. For years, we’ve all been pointing out the actual journalism of Knight-Ridder/McClatchy DC and the absurd abdication of duty by nearly everyone else. But Moyers’ aggregation of specific quotes on video from administration officials and leading pundits that compared and contrasted with what Knight-Ridder was reporting, and what we now know is the truth, was so dead on that it was almost difficult to watch. Not surprisingly, CNN, with their insistence on forsaking reporting in favor of shouted opinions from idiots, was among the worst offenders.

The second reason is this bit from Gawker of all places:

The following memo just came down [at CNN]:

Subject: Cho video and gun pictures–NO MORE USEAGE!!!

Per Jon Klein,

*No more use of the Cho videotape on our air.

* No more use of pictures of Cho with guns.

Media Operations is in the process of killing out of the system all vo’s and sots with still pictures of Cho holding guns plus all video of him talking.

The John King package, First Killing Why?, and the Sean Callebs pkg. Cho the Early Years have been updated using appropriate video. All packages are being updated on a per request basis.

The library will be archiving the original versions of the packages, but these can only be run per approval from Standards and Practices.

This is vintage Klein: get caught up in the most sensationalist stories and the most sensationalist facets of important stories, run them with abandon, then later, promise to stop, never do it again, and recommit to being a top-tier news organization. The Virginia Tech story was, of course, important. But media outlets covering big breaking news in a pack can only differentiate themselves by how they cover it. Few did a good job, and by all accounts CNN wasn’t in that group. Klein’s 11th hour backtrack is as hollow as all of his other previous actions. He’s destroyed his own credibility, and gone a long way toward finishing off what’s left of his network’s. And in a game where credibility is supposed to matter, that’s fatal.