Saving CNN Should be About News, Not Business

(updated below)

Let's look at two different proposals for how CNN can and should fix itself.

A couple weeks ago, Ross Douthat wrote a column for the NYT about how to save CNN, that was fundamentally flawed. The basic problem with his column was that while he identified the core of CNN's problem: its vapid, empty version of non-partisan journalism that basically says nothing at all and is thus just boring, he proposes an inherently problematic solution, essentially merely calling on them to bring more "debate" into the news room.

Post-partisanship in the wake of health care reform

Today you'll hear lots of post-mortem analysis of the health care reform debate. Some of this talk will be about the "death of post-partisanship." Don't be fooled: post-partisanship was dead a long time ago and it wasn't Obama who killed it.

David Sanger writes of the passage of health care reform that

[I]n the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a 'post-partisan' Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering."

Sanger is mistaken.