MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2001 -- For those on the right, the trouble with CNN is its alleged liberal bias. "Clinton News Network" was the sneering tag conservatives slapped on it in the late ’90s, thus helping to fuel the rise of the right-leaning Fox News Channel. So damaging has this perception been that Walter Isaacson, since becoming the new head of CNN earlier this year, has gone so far as to have a chitchat with Republican members of Congress, explore a talk show for right-wing icon Rush Limbaugh, and, most recently, remind his troops that they shouldn’t dwell on civilian casualties in the Afghan war without reminding viewers about the September 11 attacks. (Gee, Walter, do you think we’ve forgotten?)

For those on the left, the view of CNN is very different. Immediately after September 11, a false report starting zipping around the Net that a CNN tape of Palestinians celebrating the attacks was actually file footage shot during the Gulf War. The rumor fit perfectly with the antiwar left’s preconceived notions. As the current American Journalism Review reports, "the story continued to spiral outward to the point where even CNN officials believe it could go down as a classic urban legend, as immortal as it is inaccurate." More recently, since the bombing started, some leftists have begun referring to the network as "CMN," for "Cable Military Network," a jab at its alleged unquestioning embrace of US efforts in Afghanistan (see "Nader’s Nadir," News and Features, November 16).

That such a resolutely centrist news organization could be the subject of these ideological passions says something interesting about CNN’s place in American culture. But CNN today is in real danger — not from its critics on the left or right, but, rather, from relentless corporate pressures to squeeze out higher and higher profits with fewer and fewer people.

The last few years have not been kind to CNN. When it rocketed to prominence during the Gulf War in 1990 and ’91, and when Larry King served as a virtual media consultant for Ross Perot in 1992, CNN had the 24-hour all-news cable audience to itself. Founder Ted Turner took the opportunity presented by this fortuitous lack of competition to build up his network so that it was one of the world’s more respected international electronic news organizations — no BBC, perhaps, but a lot better than the Big Three broadcast networks, which spent the decade closing foreign bureaus and dumbing down their products.

In the mid ’90s, though, other players decided to grab a piece of the action. Microsoft and NBC formed MSNBC as a younger, hipper alternative. Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel to peel off conservatives. Of course, competition is usually a good thing. But with the tiny all-news audience suddenly split three ways, CNN’s forte — on-the-ground reporting — became too expensive, especially compared to Fox’s lineup of boneheaded talk shows, epitomized by the loathsome The O’Reilly Factor.

Things only got worse after the corporate owner to whom Turner had sold out, Time Warner, merged with AOL earlier this year. Time Warner head Gerald Levin may be calling the shots, as Ken Auletta argued recently in the New Yorker. But it’s AOL that’s holding the checkbook, and its approach suggests that of the Visigoths pillaging Rome. Last summer, the bean-counters shut down the fabled library at Time, Inc., a substantive and symbolic blow for an organization that had been fabled for its institutional memory. And CNN started emulating its downscale competition, unveiling its own lineup of lame talk shows.

Following September 11, ratings for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox all soared, and CNN — with its still-superior journalistic resources — rocketed back into the lead. Isaacson told anyone who’d listen that CNN had rediscovered its sense of mission. Well, that didn’t last. With the terrorism crisis now a bit less acute, ratings are down, and the death struggle with Fox has resumed. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that CNN will blow through its annual news budget in six months, even as ad revenues continue to plummet. The only solution — something long talked-about — may be a merger of newsgathering operations with ABC or CBS. But those networks are reportedly talking with each other, which could leave CNN out in the cold.

As Fast Company columnist John Ellis observed in the New York Press in September 2000, CNN’s problems are deep-rooted. Ellis, a veteran of NBC and the Fox News Channel (his status as President Bush’s cousin cost him his freelance gig at Fox during the Florida fiasco), argued that CNN's problem is ingrained. "The CNN culture is sort of retro-Southern gothic," Ellis wrote. "Most of the people who work there have never worked anywhere else. They see themselves as Georgians doing battle with hostile Northern forces." That was true even after Turner sold out to Time Warner, Ellis added.

That culture apparently did in Isaacson’s predecessor, Rick Kaplan, now in exile at Harvard’s Kennedy School. In the new environment, Isaacson should presumably encounter less resistance from old CNN hands — and there are fewer of them around in any case. The question is whether Isaacson’s corporate masters will let him use this opportunity to make CNN better, or to strip-mine it for lucre.

Headline of the day. From today’s Boston Herald: "Budget Fight Could Hurt — or Help — Gov Hopefuls." Yes, that just about covers it.