The latest rough patch for CNN illustrates the contradictions at the network's heart.
In a brutal time for the news business, CNN is one of the few media organizations thriving while its most visible part in the United States -- prime time on the flagship network -- is hurting. The company has built its brand on nonpartisan reporting, while CNN's audience tilts Democratic as much or more as Fox News Channel's audience is Republican.
CNN's average prime-time audience was third behind Fox and MSNBC during October, and it was even eclipsed by sister network HLN among younger viewers, according to the Nielsen Co. Perhaps more ominous, CNN finished well behind Fox when big news was breaking -- election night and the Fort Hood massacre. Big stories usually sent viewers flocking to CNN.
Prime-time success isn't a new problem in a place that has long lived and died by the news cycle. It seems more acute because CNN's younger rivals were faster in figuring out a way to make appointment viewing at night.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, whose reruns often beat Anderson Cooper's first-run newscast on CNN, mocked his rival for trafficking in news rather than analysis at night: "CNN seems to still think it is the primary source for its viewers, that they know nothing until they tune in. This is, ever increasingly, nonsensical."
At CNN, they suggest that critics take a narrow view of what it does.
The network could cast aside Cooper, Larry King and Campbell Brown for opinionated analysis and probably see its ratings go up, said Jim Walton, the president of CNN Worldwide.
The benefit for one arm of the company isn't worth the potential damage to others, he said.
CNN has built its business -- encompassing international networks and wholesale news reports, mobile-device services, a Web site and a wire service to print publications and radio -- around the notion that it is delivering nonpartisan, straight news reporting, he said.
"People hear what's being said, and it's branded CNN, and (they say), ‘OK, that's news. That's nonpartisan, that's factual, it's timely,'" Walton said. "That's what we want to deliver around the world."
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