“Why not say, ‘Hey, this is the path. We’re not going to be MSNBC, we’re not going to be Fox. We’re going to go after independent thinkers’?” Smerconish said Oct. 7 at the Un-Convention, a gathering designed to “find common ground” across politics. "And I don’t just mean just me on Saturday. We’re going to build a whole network around that principle.”

Does that appeal mean Smerconish no longer believes CNN is a “non-ideological” network? He responds via email with a quip straight from the centrist’s credo: “A good day for me is when half of social media say they hope I’ll be fired because I belong on Fox, and the rest complain that I’m carrying water for [President] Biden.”

Flashback to 2010 and this faux-interview (Jay Rosen, the author, did both Q and A in this):

Q. You are very critical of the View from Nowhere in journalism. It’s almost a derisive term for you.

A. That’s true. I let my disdain for it show.

Q. Why?

A. Because it has unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.

When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.

In fact, American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims in American newsrooms. You asked me why I am derisive toward it. That’s why.