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TV executives, tasked with the unenviable goal of reviving their ailing sector, seem to have agreed on one primary reason for their business ills: Modern-day cable news is too opinionated, loud, and partisan. The average American, they have perceived, lives far from the coasts and leans more toward the political center. Surely, they’d restart their subscriptions if they were promised more neutral talking-head perspectives on current events. This was part of the justification for pushing CBS News to the right; you also see it from MS NOW and CNN, which have purged many of their more liberal talking heads in recent years. Perhaps the most interesting experiment in this pivot to the middle comes from a channel with far less viewership than any of those name-brand networks: NewsNation, which launched five years ago with the upfront mission of serving as a reliable source of “news for all Americans.”
More than any of its peers on the airwaves, NewsNation staunchly keeps up that branding to this day, with ex–mainstream media stars like Chris Cuomo (CNN) and Leland Vittert (Fox News) serving as the faces of this mission across prime-time promos and social media ads. While legacy brands keep adjusting and readjusting their ideological positionings, NewsNation sold itself as one thing from the jump: centrist.
