It's no secret that CNN is in trouble. They've been hemorrhaging viewers for some time now and have demonstrated little success in stanching the flow, putting them solidly behind Fox News and MSNBC in the ratings race.

Now CNN is fielding advice from all quarters on how to “fix” the flagging network, much of it a variation on a single theme: ditch the straight-down-the-middle routine and inject a little color into the programming, be it ideological or personality-driven. And on paper this makes sense. Fox News' brand of hyper-partisan programming (only sometimes dressed up as “news”) has proven successful at attracting viewers, and MSNBC's “slanted” evening coverage has certainly helped to improve their standing in the ratings. But one must take into account the tension that develops between ratings and reportage.

Take, for example, Glenn Beck. His Fox News show is a ratings phenomenon, and that success has been driven largely by Beck's personality. He lards up the show with bombast and seems perpetually on the verge of a psychotic episode -- it's entertaining. A necessary condition of that format, however, is that Beck plays extremely loose with the facts. When Beck lacks actual demons to inveigh against, he invents them, sometimes not even bothering to dress his overheated monologues with a thin-veneer of factual information. He fulfills Fox News' requirement of getting eyeballs on the screens, but that comes at the cost of misinforming the public, something an ostensible “news” organization is duty-bound not to do.

And CNN, for their part, has a compelling argument for resisting the drive to inject partisanship and personality into their programming. Put simply, doing so has burned them very badly in the past. The Politico article linked to above prescribes bringing back CNN's Crossfire as a way to “fix” the network. Crossfire, of course, died an ignominious death at the hands of Jon Stewart, who almost single-handedly turned the program and its signature left-versus-right shouting matches into the epitome of everything that is wrong with cable news. And then there's Lou Dobbs, who was for a long time a successful “personality-driven” CNN host until his personality quirks -- namely his virulent anti-immigration stance and Birther dalliances -- made him an unmanageable liability for the network.

Of course, it's not a zero-sum game. Boosting a program's entertainment value does not necessarily mean its journalistic worth declines. But it's difficult to strike a workable balance.

And CNN's commitment to “straight” news in an environment that rewards partisanship has been admirable in many ways. Anderson Cooper's coverage of the Haiti earthquake was widely recognized as first-rate journalism, and the departure of Christiane Amanpour for ABC was rightly viewed as being very much CNN's loss.

But therein lies the problem -- even if you're producing excellent just-the-facts journalism, what good is it if no one sees it?