CNN’s “Podcast Look” and the Slow Death of Cable News
Last week, CNN rolled out some experiments in form and in manufactured authenticity. Anderson Cooper wore his sleeves rolled up for a roundtable discussion among a clutter of clunky microphones on a desk; Jake Tapper recorded a show from his home office, near a clothes rack of dress shirts and blazers, and talked about bringing viewers to the actual desk where he and his team do their journalism. The impression wasn’t particularly subtle—someone had obviously suggested that the network try to make its shows look more like the podcasts that millions of people now watch on YouTube or see clips of on TikTok and Instagram—and it certainly didn’t succeed in making CNN come across as more trustworthy or natural, which was presumably the goal. It felt like watching Ronald Reagan take off his shirt, paint on some jeans, and start screaming like Jello Biafra. The podcast industry’s currency, deservedly or otherwise, is oppositional: people don’t listen to Joe Rogan because they think he’s better at his job than CNN; they do it because they hate CNN.
The podcast aesthetic—casual, long-winded, sometimes profane—directly opposes, perhaps not coincidentally, the sterility and bizarre right-this-minute quality of cable news, on which everything seems incomplete and therefore manipulative, and yet somehow endless. The visual style of podcasts is purely functional, with the pandemic-inspired appearance of remote work: people are talking at you from boxes on your screen. I record my podcast, “Time to Say Goodbye,” in my basement, and have a pretty standard setup: a Shure SM7B microphone, my daughter’s art work in the background, poor lighting because why bother, and some soundproof foam panelling that’s slowly peeling away from the wall. My co-host, Tyler Austin Harper, sits in front of a bookshelf in his home office. Over the dozens of episodes we’ve recorded together, we’ve never changed the “look” of what we’re doing, because we understand that nobody really cares. Just as the best talk radio feels like a phone conversation you’re having with a friend, we want the podcast to seem like a slightly unhinged Zoom call you’re having with your annoying cousins who won’t stop ranting about why the Democrats keep losing.
But, in the past few years, podcasts have trended toward what we can loosely call professionalization, which made CNN’s recent effort even odder. The COVID-era signature of bookshelves in the background and plug-in USB microphones in the foreground has slowly given way to generic studios featuring some decent wood panelling and a couple of plants. Webcams, which produced a washed-out and slightly pixelated image, have been replaced by stand-alone video cameras that capture podcasters in deeper and richer tones. (This is one reason that so many of the big podcasts you see these days look like they borrowed the dark and moody interview sets of “Wild Wild Country.”) I doubt that these production changes will erode the supposed authenticity of an already beloved podcaster, but I also don’t see any likely benefits. Kylie Kelce, who hosts the enormously popular podcast “Not Gonna Lie,” splits her time onscreen between a standard Zoom square with her kids’ art on the wall behind her and a studio where she sits on a beige couch and talks to her guest in person. To someone who watches her clips on Instagram, there’s no meaningful difference.
What happened in podcasting is that money arrived, and some of it went into producing video clips. (“Not Gonna Lie” was created by Wave Sports & Entertainment, which produces and distributes content that features popular athletes.) Now, whenever any new media venture is launched, a whole lot of people with related experience get hired, and they start buying equipment, renting studio space, and booking production time. There’s also an acquisition war going on, with podcasts such as the sports-chat show “Pardon My Take” moving to Netflix, which might demand higher video quality than social media. Previously, the credibility that podcasters enjoyed stemmed from their opposition to mainstream media, and the low-tech and intimate videos reflected this. Today, all the professional podcast sets look similiar—a table of microphones, some swivelly mid-century-modern chairs, a dark wall—and they convey nothing at all, really. As the industry has expanded its budgets, and added more line items for improved production, the aesthetic currency of the old D.I.Y. podcast look has decreased. CNN’s experiments in information populism, then, feel doubly tragic: the network isn’t fooling anybody, and it has also misdiagnosed the value of its appropriation, like the kid putting on a Misfits shirt after Hot Topic popped up in every mall in America.
If CNN’s flirtation with podcast fashion is a bellwether for the news industry, it’s not because of what it tells us about cable networks or legacy media companies. After all, CNN has rolled out poorly conceived and wildly derivative online products for the past thirty years. The problem with all these projects is an old and recurring one: you can’t dress up like a revolutionary when you’re the reason that the revolution is kicking off. Sometime soon, we will see CNN reporters live-streaming on Twitch and YouTube from Capitol Hill. (“Hey, chat, I see Marie Gluesenkamp Perez walking up the stairs. . . . Super-chat me a question to ask her!”) Eventually, someone will pull the plug, because they’ll realize that nobody wants to subscribe to a CNN Twitch stream, just as they don’t want to watch a CNN anchor doing a video podcast from his living room. But what does it say about podcasting that its visual signals are so bland and neutered? Or that, when you scroll through your time line, you see the same types of sets, the same lighting, and, increasingly, a man at a desk talking directly to the camera, in the style of a news anchor? Right now, podcasters can still signal their authenticity by saying, “Hey, we aren’t the mainstream media.” But, as those institutions die out, and podcasters get more and more tied up with big money, the relationship between CNN and Big Podcast might start to resemble something we saw in the late two-thousands, when legacy media and well-funded startups tried to corral bloggers into a corporate shape, which held for about a decade before people scattered again, flocking to Substack and to independent podcasts. Media is always fragmenting, reconsolidating, and then fragmenting again, as yesterday’s disruption inevitably becomes today’s institution. I’ve been sitting in the same basement for almost six years now, recording the same podcast I started with my friends during the COVID lockdowns, and sometimes I think about how dated it already feels. But what I’ve concluded, and perhaps what CNN should figure out, is that you can’t really fake the insurrectionary energy, or its aesthetic. You just have to hope your audience grows old with you, before you give way to whatever comes next. ♦