How To Fix CNN

At the end of 2009, Jay Rosen offered the world his "Simple Fix for the Messed Up Sunday Shows." "Meet The Press" went out and bought some new furniture. But ABC's "This Week", paced by the enthusiasm of interim host Jake Tapper, took it to heart, and they have transformed the show into something that embraces an open-source ethos: they crowdsource on Fridays, live-tweet on Sundays, cut up embeddable clips for portability with a renewed alacrity and engage the services of Politifact a day or two later. I think it's made for a much better show!
Now, Rosen is back with some suggestions for CNN. They should listen to him!
Rosen's top concern is the weird way they have turned The View From Nowhere into their own private journalistic Idaho:

1. Drop the chronic impartiality.
CNN is brain dead. They have worked themselves into an intellectual trap of having no particular point of view; they have convinced themselves that they can't become right-wing like Fox or left-wing like MSNBC. As Jon Stewart demonstrated, CNN airs a dispute in which one side may be insane -- the earth is flat -- but the anchors fail to explain who is right. They need to cure this problem of "leaving it there," because it's killing them -- it's killing their brand, it's killing trust, it's lazy, it's superficial, and it's an audience loser.

Back in June, Gawker reported a rumor that CNN was looking for pitches on whether or not there is a "good side" to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. As it turned out, the rumor wasn't true. But could you blame anyone for believing that CNN would pull something like that? This was, after all, the news organization that gave its readers a chance to hear the "Two Sides of the Confederacy Debate" on its website, in an example of what Alex Pareene called the network's "trademarked brand of compulsive objectivity."
Much, much later CNN got around to discovering the "good side" of the oil spill and yes, it was an embarrassing joke.
Rosen also touches, glancingly on a pet peeve of mine: "Social media is more than a gimmick." Rosen uses that tent pole as a way to critique the overselling of CNN's i-Reports, but I would really like to add that if CNN decides to never again read someone's Twitter account out loud on live television, that would be fine with me. (You guys look rather daft, in the way you seem to treat Twitter as if the Roswell aliens and the Oracle of Delphi birthed it into a world that barely understands it.)

At any rate, you should go ahead and read the rest of Rosen's suggestions at Esquire. CNN President Jon Klein should read it four -- even five! -- times.