Get Well Wishes for Aaron Brown

TVNewser has news that former CNN'er Aaron Brown is having heart surgery today in Phoenix, AZ. Brown spoke with TVN about the television news industry and his former employer:

On the subject of television, Brown says the abundance of international breaking news over the last month plays to CNN’s institutional strengths, but at the same time “masks its underlying weaknesses.”

“CNN can’t succeed in a world where people want news to be entertaining,” he says. "Bill O'Reilly is inherently more entertaining than anything CNN does. It’s more fun to see an action movie than read a book.”

What CNN does have, however, “is a world-class brand that would be the envy of any news organization in the world except, perhaps, the New York Times. It doesn’t win [the ratings], but maybe that’s not the most important thing.”

To Brown, journalism is the most important thing. And on that point, he doesn’t hold much respect for Fox News’ O’Reilly, ex-MSNBC star Keith Olbermann and others, labeling them as “skilled entertainers who use journalism as a canvas on which to perform.”

O’Reilly is “the least self-conscious guy in the world. He makes 30 million dollars a year and talks about himself as a populist. The only one better than O’Reilly is [Stephen] Colbert. He’s a better O’Reilly than O’Reilly.”

Fox News colleague Glenn Beck “sits around with a blackboard and says profoundly stupid things, and he gets two million people to watch him.”

At Brown’s alma mater, Elliott Spitzer bullied Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker off their fledging 8 p.m. show, Brown says.

“She’s an adult. He’s a child. He wasn’t interested in sharing the space. The weight of his personality blew her off the screen. He’s a big, bombastic cable person, but he gets his ass kicked by O’Reilly from here to the moon.”

Brown, a Parker fan, says he would have advised her against taking the gig. “It was dumb for her. She’s really smart and talented. She didn’t need it. Someone probably dropped a million dollars on her. I don’t think much of how CNN handled it.”

As for Anderson Cooper, Brown’s successor at CNN, he saves his best brickbat for last.

“I know the difference between journalism and a slogan. ‘Keeping them honest’ [tagline for Cooper’s ‘360’] is a slogan.”

To read the entire article just follow the link.

UPDATE: CNN issued an response to Aaron's perceived criticism of AC360:

From a CNN spokesperson:

We wish Aaron well in his upcoming surgery, and we think viewer response to CNN’s recent coverage of historic events around the world on “Anderson Cooper 360″ and the rest of our TV and digital platforms speaks for itself.

All content, unless otherwise cited, is © All Things CNN and may not be used without consent of the blog administrator.

Your Views on the News, October 9, 2010

A few readers sent us the link to an article that ran in New York Magazine entitled Chasing Fox, written by Gabriel Sherman. Sherman writes about, among other things, how Klein came up with the Parker/Spitzer team, Aaron Brown, Crossfire and the long rumored CNN/CBS merge. Here are a few of the opening paragraphs. It's a really interesting read and we hope you'll find time to read the entire article by following the link.

In the spring of 2006, a year and a half after he was hired to run CNN/U.S., Jonathan Klein went to his boss Jim Walton with an idea. CNN was in trouble. While the network remained a profit engine and an iconic brand, prime-time ratings were stalled. Fox News had surged ahead in the cable-news race, and now, alarmingly, Keith Olbermann was coming on strong. His anti-Bush broadsides were transforming his 8 p.m. MSNBC show, Countdown, into a bombastic counterweight to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, and combined, both personalities were drowning out CNN’s Paula Zahn, the respected television veteran who was anchoring a standard newscast during the 8 p.m. slot.

And so Klein set out to poach Olbermann. At the time, Olbermann had a window to negotiate in his MSNBC contract and Klein made a hard sell. He told Olbermann he could bring Countdown to CNN—the two even discussed which members of Olbermann’s staff would make the move with him. “Jon and I were in very deep discussions on a regular basis for me to go over there,” says Olbermann. “One of the premises was we would have put MSNBC out of business.”

Ted Turner’s vision of the primacy of the news remained something of a religion at CNN. But Klein was hired to take risks. A former executive vice-president at CBS News, Klein had a reputation as an expletive-spouting showman. He was based at CNN’s offices in the Time Warner Center, lunched frequently at Gabriel’s and Porter House New York, and enjoyed reading his quotes in the Times. When he took the job in 2004, he insisted CNN give him the title of president. It was a style that didn’t always sit well with Walton and senior executives in Atlanta, which had been the power center that imbued the network with a folksy, cautious sensibility. A CNN lifer who had joined the network as a 23-year-old video journalist, Walton cast himself as a protector of CNN tradition.

Walton pushed back on Klein’s plan to hire Olbermann. “I’m not gonna be the guy who’s gonna turn CNN into an opinion network,” he told executives in meetings. But in Klein’s view, CNN already was an opinion network. For an hour each night, Walton tolerated Lou Dobbs’s anti-immigration tirades. Klein pressed Walton to reconsider, but Walton held firm. “I bailed out when it became apparent that the people above [Klein] were less than sanguine about this,” Olbermann tells me.

There has been plenty of movement since then at CNN: Campbell Brown came and went; Lou Dobbs was finally forced out; Larry King at long last retired. But ratings have mostly flowed in one direction: downward—down 40 percent since 2009.

Klein faced a possibly insoluble cable-news riddle: How do you build the kind of excitement that draws in viewers without being partisan? At a Time Warner board meeting this spring, Walton was forced to defend CNN’s ratings issues. The pressure on Klein ratcheted up. In April, Klein began talks with British talk-show personality Piers Morgan. In June, he announced that he would hire the famously black-socked and disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer. Klein faced stiff internal resistance to hiring Spitzer. When one CNN executive expressed to Klein the concern that viewers risked being turned off by Spitzer’s hooker scandal, Klein had snapped, “I don’t give a fuck.”

Pairing him with a female co-host was delicate. “They were concerned a young, beautiful co-host wouldn’t work,” said one source familiar with the show’s development. Finally, they settled on Kathleen Parker, an attractive 59-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative columnist. The Parker Spitzer show debuts on October 4.

Klein thought his place at the network was secure. Six weeks ago, CNN signed him to a new contract. But late last month, Walton made his move. Klein was planning to head to a rehearsal for the Parker Spitzer show when he stopped by Walton’s office. In a five-minute conversation, Walton told Klein he was out. “You’re the best president CNN has ever had, but we’re making a change,” he told him. In Klein’s place, Walton was bringing in longtime CNN executive Ken Jautz, a former CNN Berlin bureau chief who had successfully juiced the ratings of sister network HLN by taking it down-market and tabloid. For now, Jautz is staying the course. “Our business model is based on quality journalism and nonpartisan programming,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong; we have a ratings challenge in prime time.”

All content, unless otherwise cited, is © All Things CNN and may not be used without consent of the blog administrator.

9/11

When I began to think about my post for September 11th my mind was naturally drawn to Aaron Brown. September 11, as many of you know, was Aaron's first day on air at CNN in NYC. He had been on the job since July but his new program hadn't premiered as of that terrible day. Within minutes of arriving at his CNN office he was on the roof guiding viewers through one of the most horrific days our country has ever seen. I'll begin with a short look back at Aaron's coverage that day.

I had the pleasure of attending a speech Mr. Brown gave, in March 2007, at Arizona State University. He had just finished a semester as the John J. Rhodes Chair in Public Policy and American Institutions at the ASU Honors College. Aaron must have done an amazing job (no great surprise) since shortly after completing his guest professorship he was hired to teach at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I wrote a post covering the topics of the night for our sister blog All Things Anderson. Here's the link if you'd like to read more.
As Aaron said, on the night I was in the audience at ASU, he rarely talks about 9/11. He said he feels uncomfortable discussing that day because he is no expert, just an observer like the rest of us. On the 5 year anniversary of September 11 Mr. Brown decided it was time to share his experience. In this speech he gave at the Elliott School of International Affairs on September 8, 2006, he talks of his 16 hours on air covering the tragedy, the impact that day had on his life and how the CNN team came together to tell the world it had been forever changed.

I struggled with how I could encourage each of you to watch this video of Aaron's account of 9/11. I realize it takes us to a dark place, but as ugly and painful as it is to relive the events of that day it is necessary. Necessary so that we don't forget and necessary so that we don't ever, ever have another day like September 11, 2001. ~Phebe