A week ago, reading Tim Alberta’s 15,000 word Atlantic piece on the tribulations of CNN exec Chris Licht, I kept shaking my head and saying, “This isn’t survivable.” In a rare moment of foresight (for me) I was quickly proven correct. Days later Licht was “let go” and CNN was “moving on.”

What made the story unsurvivable wasn’t just the reporting on CNN’s ratings problem or even Licht’s handling of the absurdly problematic town hall with Donald Trump, although that is very much connected, as much as it was the portrait of a much too generic corporate functionary in way over his head in terms of dealing with his primary resources, namely the anchors, reporters and staff at CNN. Had Licht been wheeled in to shore up the quarterly earnings statement at Road Runner Acme Explosives, Inc. he might still be in charge. But not when his mission was to sell a “reset” of journalistic tone and focus to hundreds of professionals whose primary skill set involves recognizing the pungent odor of bullshit.

Others have focused on all variety of details in the extraordinarily well reported piece, but Alberta — formerly at Politico and a guy with deep sources within what used to be your father’s Republican party — correctly placed particular focus on Licht’s determination to apply the concept of “absolute truth” to CNN’s presentation of the news. Alberta presses him several times on what … exactly … that means … “absolute truth?”

Licht had no good answer. As Generic Corporate Man, Licht was groomed and installed by David Zaslav the current head of recently reconfigured Warner Brothers-Discovery + and himself answerable to Colorado billionaire John Malone, long-serving board member and, FWIW, the second largest land owner in the United States. If you’re scoring at home, Malone — a classic old school Republican — wasn’t pleased with CNN’s persistent hyper-critical tone toward Trump, and put his energies into getting Zaslav his job with the clear instructions to restore CNN to something like partisan neutrality, which largely determind Zaslav’s choice of Licht. (I’ll leave aside for the moment that Zaslav, paid $165 million annually, is widely viewed as Voldemort in the current strike by TV writers. Generic, AI-style scripted TV being acceptable as long as those quarterly numbers hold up.)

Point being here that this generic/neutrality shtick/vision from Malone (and other board members) which begat Zaslav which begat Licht was nakedly obvious to CNN’s employees. As Alberta and others now tell the story, rebalancing objectivity wasn’t the issue for CNN’s staff. There was acceptance of the idea of dialing back the constant Trump rage. But Licht appeared clueless about how to do that given the, um, pesky journalistic, reality-based facts at hand.

What Licht couldn’t articulate to his news team was how … exactly … do you report on so prominent a public, political figure as Trump, and those who so ardently supprt him, without reporting, objectively and accurately, with a commitment to something approaching absolute truth, that he’s a fraud and a liar as well as criminally incompetent?

Go ahead. Everyone’s listening. We’ll take notes.

Absolute truth: Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump says he didn’t. One is absolutely true, the other isn’t. Are we going to pretend both are?

This was and to some extent still is a serious issue for many levels of modern journalism, but particularly those still adherring to paradigms of reporting now wildly out-paced by characters and competitors for whom truth, absolute and otherwise, is first and foremost a sales game. What’s true is whatever the people will believe.

Back in 2016 I did a piece talking to local journalism profs and pros about injecting the word “lying” into reporting on then candidate Trump. The consensus was that “lying” should be applied only as a last resort and with full confidence of (Trump’s) intent, which of course no one could ever say, so in effect you never use the word “lying.”

That standard has clearly eroded over the ensuing seven and a half years, with even The New York Times, deploying “the ‘L’ word” … judiciously. Meanwhile, CNN, cable competitors like MSNBC and untold websites applied “lie”, “lies” and “lying” much more generously. Some would say “excessively”, though still not inaccurately or unfairly in the context of Trump.

The question for Licht and now for post-CNN and other news organizations still timorous about calling Trump and his hyper-partisan acolytes what they clearly/absolutely are, is how do you assert journalistic credibility when you decline to describe accurately and in the common vernacular what is so vividly apparent? What are you protecting yourself or your audience from?

Countless norms have been broken by Trump’s rampage across the international stage. The once sagacious concept of a balanced presentation of both sides of story, essentially communicating validity in both points of view, has taken a particularly brutal battering in The Age of Trump. Most reporters and most audiences are too smart, and have access to too many other venues of information, to see neutrality as an asset.

What they see instead is timidity, and often complicity.