John King, a former Associated Press reporter, White House correspondent, Magic Wall operator, and consummate straight newsman, will be replacing opinionated anchor Lou Dobbs in the CNN's 7 p.m. time slot. CNN doubles down on straight news

As rival cable networks cash in on commentary, CNN is betting big on straight news.

That was its message Thursday morning when it announced that John King — a former Associated Press reporter, White House correspondent, Magic Wall operator, and consummate straight newsman — would be replacing opinionated anchor Lou Dobbs in the network’s 7 p.m. time slot.


Three decades after Ted Turner revolutionized television news with the launch of CNN, it’s actually now viewed as counterintuitive for a cable network to commit more to straight news in the evening. And King himself seems something of a throwback.

“I think what is troubling in part of our business is you have people on news shows who start the conversation with a bias,” King told POLTICO from Montana.

That he called from snowy Helena is telling. It’s the 44th state King’s visited this year for his Sunday show, “State of the Union” and a testament to his belief that reporting is essential for breaking down the news on cable. Currently CNN’s chief national correspondent, King joined the network after 12 years with the Associated Press doing reporting the old fashioned way — in war zones and the campaign trail.

For the unnamed show, which launches early next year, King will be based in D.C. but plans to continue taking the nation’s pulse from the road. And, King says, he’ll remain an honest broker during political debates among guests, regardless of what cable stars on the other networks may be doing. “I don’t come to the table with an ideological bias,” King said. “I’m fascinated by all sides of these issues.”

That is not necessarily a winning approach. Last month, CNN’s prime-time lineup — with Campbell Brown, Larry King and Anderson Cooper on the air from 8 to 11 p.m. — fell to fourth place in the key demographic of viewers ages 25 to 54, according to Nielsen. Fox News continued its dominance in prime time, with MSNBC and sister network HLN also beating the cable news innovator.

King himself will not go head-to-head with an ideological competitor like Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann. The competition in his time slot consists of Fox’s Shepard Smith, who hosts a traditional newscast before O’Reilly takes over at 8 p.m., and a repeat of Chris Matthews’s “Hardball.”

When it comes to ratings, putting King at 7 p.m. is really not that much of a gamble. It’s doubtful he can fare much worse against the competition.

Last month, Dobbs came in third place in total viewers (649,000) and fourth in the 25-to-54 demographic (163,000). By comparison, Smith racked up close to 2 million viewers, with 463,000 from that key audience.

The unhappy trend continued as the night went on. From 8 to 11 p.m., Brown, King and Cooper all finished third or fourth in the 25-54 demographic — far from the prime-time leaders. At 8 p.m., for instance, O’Reilly brought in more than five times as many viewers as Brown.

But the switch from Dobbs to King isn’t just about 7 p.m. in cableland. It reflects CNN’s much-stated mission, and it’s a noble one. But can it work?

“I applaud what they’re doing,” said veteran television journalist Sam Donaldson, ”but if I were an investor, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.”

“The trend — and is it going to reverse, I don’t know — is toward opinion,” Donaldson added.

Clearly, CNN president Jon Klein and his management team know that’s the trend, or at least the conventional wisdom in the industry. News of CNN’s sagging prime-time ratings in October led to plenty of hand-wringing in media circles. But Klein has consistently said that the network would remain committed to news over opinion, and King now serves as the missing piece in a line-up where Dobbs seemed out of step between Wolf Blitzer’s “Situation Room” and Brown’s 8 p.m. show.

“The program will reflect what CNN is all about: straight facts from our anchors and the widest range of opinions from across the political spectrum,” Klein said in a statement Thursday. And in a memo to staff, he said that King “embodies what we are striving for at CNN.”

With nearly 30 years at CNN, Dobbs’s outspoken views on issues like immigration were grandfathered into the schedule, not really fitting with where the network wanted to be headed. Earlier this year, executives pushed Dobbs to do a more straightforward newscast, which worked for a while. That is, until he began questioning whether President Barack Obama had really proved that he was born in Hawaii and was an American citizen.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on POLITICO’s Arena Thursday that Dobbs's presence represented “a perversion of that mission, not because of his particular views but because the network never forced him to make a clear distinction between news reporting and his own ideological campaigning.”

King, on the contrary, is respected among his peers as a straight news reporter, not an advocate. Donaldson praised King’s abilities and said that ABC twice tried hiring him over the years. But he added that King “is not going to do what the most successful shows on cable networks seem to be doing.”

Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, told the AP this week that the network’s influence extends beyond the United States, and a hyper-partisan line-up could tarnish the news brand around the world. “We compete against a lot more than Fox and MSNBC," Walton said.

Still, it’s the U.S. ratings that are going to get the most attention, regardless of the fact that CNN remains a successful, and profitable worldwide news company. And whether it’s because the nation is more polarized than ever, or that viewers already get the day’s news on cable, the Internet, or through their phone, it’s questionable whether CNN can swing upstream against the current of opinion on competing networks.

Olbermann, MSNBC’s outspoken 8 p.m. host, told the AP last month that CNN’s model is out of date when it comes to how people consume news and information.

"CNN seems to still think it is the primary source for its viewers, that they know nothing until they tune in," Olbermann said. "This is, ever increasingly, nonsensical. People now watch news on TV for elucidation and context and analysis. They have brought the facts with them, the way we used to bring TV dinners."

King would likely agree that viewers want “elucidation and context and analysis.” In speaking with POLITICO, he mentioned the need for better explanation of the issues and “peeling back the pages” for viewers. However, King said that can be done “without shouting.”

Management approached King just a few days ago about replacing Dobbs, there are few details of precisely what he plans to do. But a goal, he said, is to “play it straight, be objective, invite all sides in, but have a lively discussion.”

While that sounds all well and good, Mark Jurkowitz, associate director for Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, asks, “Can they bring value-added through this program?”

“How fundamentally different is it going to be from “The Situation Room"? Jurkowitz continued.

Still, Jurkowitz said there could easily be room for an “intelligent, well-reported show that goes pretty deep into the day’s news and tells you things you don’t know.” And it’s too early, he said, to write off the idea that nonpartisan news simply can’t work anymore after dinner.

“Cable is too new a medium for everything to be etched in stone,” he said.