The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Clinton News Network

Posted on | January 26, 2017 | 1 Comment

Gabriel Sherman at New York magazine:

Shortly after 9 p.m. [Tuesday] night, Donald Trump launched another salvo at CNN, tweeting: “Congratulations to @FoxNews for being number one in inauguration ratings. They were many times higher than FAKE NEWS @CNN — public is smart!” CNN tweeted back that they had matched Fox in Nielsen numbers: “Those are the facts.”
Trump’s attacks on CNN may be a response to the network’s recent coverage, which Trump views as biased and unfair. But sources say there may also be a personal dimension at play: According to people close to both sides, Trump has told White House staffers that he feels personally betrayed by CNN chief Jeff Zucker.
Trump complains that Zucker should be programming CNN more favorably toward him because of their long relationship, which can be traced back to 2004 when Zucker put The Apprentice on NBC. Trump has also said to White House staffers that Zucker owes him because Trump helped get him the job at CNN.

The bias at CNN is not a matter of personal perception. The network clearly made a choice, several years ago, to challenge MSNBC for the loyalty of left-wing voters, and it did so in very cynical way: First, by treating the Tea Party movement of 2009-2010 as illegitimate, and second, by turning the 2012 Trayvon Martin story into national news.

Some of this was arguably defensible as a business decision. If Fox News dominates among Republican-leaning voters, it would seem logical that the two other major cable networks — CNN and MSNBC — are vying mainly for Democrat-leaning voters. During the Bush presidency, MSNBC boosted its ratings by positioning Keith Olbermann as the spokesman for anti-Bush sentiment. Olbermann’s “Angriest Man on TV” act, however, lost much of its raison d’etre once Obama became president. When Olbermann left MSNBC in 2011, this created an opportunity for CNN, and they have exploited it quite irresponsibly.

CNN’s coverage of the Trayvon Martin story, treating this shooting as emblematic of American race relations, was clearly an election-year attempt to mobilize black voters in support of Obama’s re-election campaign. Nothing else could explain why, in a nation where young black men are rather routinely murdered by other young black men, CNN should devote so much coverage to this local crime story from Sanford, Florida, merely because the shooter was “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman. And having discovered they could exploit racial hostility for ratings, CNN then doubled down in 2014 with its biased coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“According to one analysis, of all the people shot and killed in the U.S. by police so far in 2016, only 24 percent, or 122, were black. Black people are only about 13 percent of the population but they commit around half of all violent crimes. So far this year 47 percent of people shot and killed by police, or 235 individuals, were white.
“Only 3 percent, or 13 people shot and killed by police year to date were black and unarmed.”
— Matthew Vadum, July 8, 2016

The “Black Lives Matter” movement was to a great extent created by CNN. Every time a cop shot a black suspect anywhere in America, it seemed, CNN went into round-the-clock coverage mode, and we might ask whether the riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlotte would have happened had it not been for CNN.

Race riots and politics — that’s what CNN has been about, and their coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign was so blatantly one-sided that they certainly earned their title as the “Clinton News Network.”

What would truly objective TV journalism look like? We don’t know. The claim by Fox News that their network is “fair and balanced” has long been scoffed at by liberals, but if Fox is pro-Republican in its bias, is it therefore necessary that CNN be anti-Republican? And what about the real-life consequences of such biased coverage?

How can CNN justify its deliberate incitement of racial hostility — which is the only accurate way to describe the network’s coverage of Ferguson, etc. — when this foments an anti-police bias that endangers the lives of citizens, including innocent black people who suffer from a wave of criminal violence? And isn’t it also the case that CNN, by promoting the Democrat Party’s narrative of Trump as a dangerous villain, helped incite the violence that erupted during the inauguration protests in D.C.?

 

Because most conservatives watch Fox News, they may not realize how extreme the partisan bias at CNN has become in recent years. If you are a Republican who hasn’t watched CNN lately, you should try watching it occasionally, just to see the alternative universe that CNN presents to its audience. The producers at CNN seem to assume that their viewers are all Democrats who hate Trump. The producers’ concept of who is watching CNN dictates the network’s coverage. It’s not just politics, but CNN’s coverage of everything which is made to conform to this partisan worldview. CNN would never knowingly hire a Republican as a producer, writer, director, editor or reporter. Everyone in any position of influence at CNN is a Democrat, and the network’s coverage is scripted and edited by Democrats for Democrats. Whenever any news event happens that might tend to contradict this partisan weltanschauung, CNN immediately convenes a panel of pundits to spin it around the other way, to explain and interpret the news according to the officially-approved talking points issued from Democrat Party headquarters. Anyone who watches CNN closely cannot help but perceive that most of the network’s anchors — Chris Cuomo, John Berman, Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, et al. — are motivated by a deep personal hatred of the Republican Party. Everyone in Chris Cuomo’s circle of family and friends hates everything Ronald Reagan stood for, and Erin Burnett would spit on any Republican voter who even so much as tried to speak to her.

It is impossible to exaggerate how wildly biased CNN actually is, and the fact that other liberal journalists are complaining about the way Donald Trump is calling out CNN tells you that the Democrat-controlled media machinery understands the importance of CNN to their collective mission of producing partisan propaganda.

 

Category: CNN, Donald Trump, Media Bias

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One Response to “The Clinton News Network”

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