Is Jake Tapper CNN's Future—Or its Past?

June, 2014
By Reid Cherlin

The framed cartoon on Sam Feist’s wall, handsomely inked and shaded, shows Al Gore as a beanie-wearing grade-schooler standing in front of a weaving spider. “1954—Al Gore discovers the web,” reads the caption. The drawing dates from 1999, just after Gore said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” Feist, the producer of the segment, tore the cartoon out of Roll Call and had it framed. Fifteen years later, Feist is CNN’s Washington bureau chief, and the young artist, Jake Tapper, is one of CNN’s most promising talents. “Most people don’t know he’s a cartoonist,” Feist says with obvious pride. “He could actually do it for a living if he wanted to.”

Tapper, until last year a White House correspondent at ABC News, now anchors his own show, The Lead, on CNN—a venerable network at a crossroads. Once the embodiment of TV news gravitas, CNN, by the time Tapper moved there, had taken an embarrassing tumble in the ratings and lost its grip on its hard-news identity. “Its low prime-time ratings are the stuff of punch lines and a journalism school case study in the damage wrought by the digital age,” the New York Times wrote just after the 2012 elections.

The network’s solution was to hire Jeff Zucker, the controversial NBC executive and onetime wunderkind who, at age 26, had catalyzed Today’s 16-year run at the head of the morning-show pack. Since Zucker took over, perhaps unsurprisingly, CNN has drawn criticism from media watchers for moving even further away from actual news and toward more of the infotainment programming that worked so well for Zucker at Today. This spring, that criticism centered around CNN’s near-nonstop coverage of the missing Malaysian airliner, at the expense of arguably more serious news like the Russian takeover of Crimea...

Read on at Politico Magazine ➝