CNN mess over Cuomo shows dangers of news-as-entertainment

CNN found itself at the center of the US news cycle this week, after its primetime host Chris Cuomo was abruptly fired for helping to shape the response of his brother, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo to multiple accusations of sexual harassment.

Lemon also came up in the staged attack of Empire star Jussie Smollett, when the actor testified at trial that he received a text from Lemon warning him that his decision not to hand his phone records over to detectives had triggered an investigation.

The interplay between politics and the media is hardly new, but represents a broader crisis for journalism in America, says Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review.

But the larger question concerns to what extent US cable news has handed over its most viewed, and therefore profitable, hours over to political commentary. Once that was an issue that largely affected rightwing Fox News. Then left-leaning MSNBC. Now supposedly mainstream channels like CNN are at it.

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said the Cuomo saga is no more than another stop in the creation of a cable news star system.

According to ratings data compiled by Nielsen, Fox News recorded an average primetime audience of 2.6m viewers in November, followed by MSNBC with 1.1m, and CNN with 654,000.

In the post-Cuomo CNN era,will we see a continuation of primetime opinion or kick it back to cooler heads from the news division?