CNN Will Never Get It

The brains over at CNN are trying to come up with ways to beat Fox News:

Like a football coach with a stopwatch, Mr. Klein has been seeking to overhaul how Mr. Brown takes the ball from Mr. King as part of a broader effort to increase the amount of time viewers spend watching the network's prime-time lineup. Specifically, in a ratings game that he says can be won in inches, Mr. Klein has told his staff that that he wants to increase the average amount of time viewers spend watching CNN's prime-time lineup by an average of 30 seconds a month for the next 12 months - for what would be a total gain of six minutes.

Blah, Blah, Blah. It's quite simple Mr. Klein; the American viewing public just seems to find Aaron Brown extremely boring. The same goes for Anderson Cooper and near everyone else at CNN. They are the AOL of the cable news world; they developed the concept but grew stagnant and didn't see the changes coming. Here's more:

In an effort to narrow the gap with Fox at night, Mr. Klein has ruled out one obvious option: he will not, he says, turn CNN's prime-time lineup into a liberal counterpunch to Fox's opinion-driven programming, which draws a heavily conservative audience. "It's much better to be right down the middle," Mr. Klein said in an interview. "Moderates are our sweet spot."

OK. That Aaron Brown is "right down the middle", right? CNN has never shaken the liberal mindset instilled in its infancy by Ted Turner, until it does it will continue to flounder.

My favorite idea is this:

In a segment last Wednesday on the program "Paula Zahn Now," for example, Rick Sanchez, a former local news anchor who worked for Mr. Cheatwood in Miami and who joined CNN last year, strapped on a device known as a shock belt - worn around the waist, it can deliver 50,000 volts of electricity to a person's body - and then gave a simple command: "Do it."
Moments later, Mr. Sanchez moaned audibly, crumpled to the floor, and, still panting after being helped to his feet, reported: "It hurts. It's painful. But no one's dead."

They might have hit on something here; if they put that shock belt on each of their anchors and the public could shock them everytime they said something stupid, I'd watch. Let's start with Larry King.