Category: CNN

CNN’s Ratings Fall Even Further

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How bad are CNN’s ratings? Lower than the Hallmark Channel, so low that their highest-rated show (“Chris Cuomo Primetime”) is 26th among all cable news programs, a smaller audience than most daytime hours on Fox News. A complete collapse for the trapped-in-the-airport network:

CNN’s prime-time ratings dropped a whopping 26 percent in April compared to last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.
MSNBC’s ratings were down 14 percent in April 2019 compared to April 2018, while Fox News’s ratings overall were flat.
The sharp decrease for CNN marked its lowest-rated month in total viewers since October 2015.
In the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet most, it was the network’s least-watched month since Aug. 2015.
In prime time, Fox News finished first with an average of 2.4 million viewers. In April 2018, the network also averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
MSNBC was second with an average of 1.66 million viewers, down from 1.93 million in April 2018.
CNN was third with 767,000 average primetime viewers, down from 1.04 million in April 2018.

If you see Anderson Cooper’s picture on a milk carton, you’ll know why.



 

Category: CNN

Nerd Prom Drama Queens: Employees of Minor Cable Network Are Pouting

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You may have never heard of this thing called “CNN,” an obscure cable TV network with lower ratings than the Food Network. Anyway, Jake Tapper and Brian Stelter are employees of CNN, and they are unhappy because the President of the United States doesn’t like their annual party:

The White House has ordered Trump administration officials to boycott the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, according to a senior administration official.
The order was issued Tuesday morning by White House Cabinet Secretary Bill McGinley, who announced that all Trump administration officials are being ordered to boycott the dinner, scheduled for Saturday night.
An administration official adds that the order came from Trump personally, though staffers have been trying to talk him out of it.
The move marks yet another deterioration in relations between the White House press office and the press corps, though President Donald Trump had announced earlier this month that he would be skipping the annual dinner for the third year in a row. The President will instead hold a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the same evening. . . .
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders also previously told CNN she would not be attending the dinner, instead traveling to the Trump rally with the President.
Sanders had attended the two previous dinners under the Trump administration. Last year, she was infamously roasted by comedian Michelle Wolf while sitting at the head table on stage.
Afterward, while commentators debated whether the performance was too mean-spirited, Trump said Wolf “bombed” and set her up as a symbol of Hollywood elitism, someone for his base to oppose.

Last year’s so-called “roast” was (a) grossly insulting and (b) not funny. Anyway, Ace of Spades points out that Tapper and Stelter falsely claim the purpose of the White House Corresponsdents’ Association dinner (a/k/a “nerd prom”) is to raise money for journalism scholarships. In fact, the percentage of proceeds going to fund scholarships has declined sharply, from nearly 60 percent in 2009 to less than 13 percent in 2016. So the lying liars at CNN are, you guessed it, lying again.



 

Category: CNN

Max Boot Is an Idiot

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Tucker Carlson opened his show Tuesday night by taking aim at one of the most overrated neocon gasbags in Washington:

“Here’s a helpful hint about how your government works. We’re full of helpful hints on this show. If you ever see consensus forming in Washington, run — something awful is about to happen. For decades you’ll remember, there was total consensus that our trade deals could not be better. They helped everyone. Meanwhile, as they were telling you that, America’s manufacturing sector died and huge parts of the middle class died along with it. There was bipartisan consense on the Iraq War and the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction we would supposedly find there, but didn’t. A few years later, there was consensus on banking regulations; that was just before the financial crisis hit. There was still more consensus on the creation of an all-seeing surveillance state that was supposed to somehow help you, but that is now scanning your face and reading your texts. There wasn’t much debate in Washington about any of those policies. There should have been.
“So it is with some skepticism that we note a new consensus forming here, this one about our southern border. ‘It may look bad down there,’ they’re telling us, “but calm down! It’s fine! Everything’s just fine!’ That’s the new word from Max Boot. Boot is a columnist for Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, but more than that, Boot is the living repository of every warmed-over cliché, every silly half-truth, every stale scrap of stupid conventional wisdom the buffoons who run this place have thought up recently. So here’s the latest — this is from Boot’s appearance on CNN last night.

MAX BOOT ON CNN: “I’m ready to declare a national emergency. The national emergency is not on the southern border, it’s in Washington, D.C., with a president who is lawless and out of control.”

“Who is this guy? Well, Max Boot calls himself a foreign policy expert. That’s a title that doesn’t actually mean anything, but in practice, it allows Boot to agitate for more counter-productive foreign wars. In the years since 9/11, Max Boot has demanded military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea, and likely many other places. He’s called for the U.S. to topple the Saudi monarchy, and of course, like so many neocons, Boot fell headlong into the Russia conspiracy for more than two excruciating years. It’s hard to think of anyone in this country more discredited than Max Boot. Going to him for foreign policy advice is like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a cooking show — he’d be the last person you’d ask. So of course, Max Boot now has gigs at CNN, the Washington Post and the Council on Foreign Relations, because that’s how Washington really works. The key is, never apologize, never admit fault, no matter what. Watch Max Boot explain that the idea of toppling the Libyan government — which was deranged — was in fact brilliant. We just didn’t do it right.”

MAX BOOT, 2014: “We did a great job of overthrowing Gadhafi, but did nothing to secure the country afterwards, and there was, I might add, a similar lack of planning for our pull-out in the case of Iraq, where there was very little sense of what would happen after U.S. troops left in 2010. We can’t think about these as being kind of quick in-and-out engagements — we send some troops, kill some people and then come back home to a victory parade. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Boot didn’t explain how exactly it does work. He didn’t need to explain. Everyone knows his assumption is the same as permanent Washington’s core assumption — military occupation is always the right answer, no matter what the question is. Sending somebody else’s kids to a foreign country is always and everywhere the right thing to do. When Donald Trump pledged to pull Americans out of Syria, Max Boot went crazy, just on principle, because no troops can ever leave, ever.”

MAX BOOT, DECEMBER 2018: “There is nobody who knows anything about the situation in Syria who recommends doing this. … This is a Christmas gift to America’s enemies. This will help ISIS, this will help Russia, this will help Iran, this will help Bashar Assad and this will hurt Israel and our Kurdish allies.”

“What did Max Boot not say? What do you notice about that? Well, he never explained how keeping Americans in Syria would help the United States. Why didn’t he mention it? Because he doesn’t care. Nobody in Washington cares, and maybe that’s why you never hear anyone ask questions about our current military commitments.”

You can watch the whole thing on video:

 

By the way, do you realize how small CNN’s audience is? Monday night, Tucker Carlson’s audience on Fox News was 2.9 million, while the 8 p.m. hour on CNN got barely 800,000 viewers. The Fox audience is more than three times larger than CNN, and in fact, CNN’s audience is also smaller than Nickelodeon, HGTV and the Discovery ID true-crime channel. Fox News is Number One in primetime cable ratings; CNN is 15th.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Several of the commenters have complained that the headline is too obvious, but it’s important to have it stated plainly for the sake of Google searches and future historians who may wonder, “What the f–k went wrong with the Republican Party during the first decade of the 21st century?” The answer: Max Boot, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, quite generally.



 

Jeffrey Toobin Is Scum

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In the sidebar, Ace of Spades reminds us that CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin is an immoral scumbag who cheated on his wife with the 20-something daughter of his colleague Jeff Greenfield. When his young paramour got pregnant, Toobin pressured her to get an abortion, but she had the baby and a DNA test proved Toobin was the father.

This was far from the only example of Toobin’s dishonesty and utter lack of moral character — he pilfered files from the independent counsel’s office back in the 1980s — but of course, no good person would work for CNN, and perhaps Toobin is not worse than, say, Don Lemon. At any rate, Toobin scraped the bottom again Monday:

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN chief legal analyst, said outgoing DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will forever be known as “the woman who put children in cages” and she will “get what she deserves.”

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: You know what? I don’t know. And I think the problem is that, you know, the laws allow people to seek asylum in the United States across the border; and they’re seeking it in great numbers.
But Kirstjen Nielsen, I think, is a great example of what happens when you go to work for Donald Trump. He is the great reputation killer. I mean, here’s this woman who, you know, was a reasonably admired bureaucrat. And for the rest of her life — for the rest of her life — people will look at her and think, “Oh, that’s the woman who put children in cages. That’s the woman who broke up families across the border.”
And you know what? They’ll be right. Because she implemented that policy. Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, sort of created it, but she implemented it. And, you know, she’s going to get what she deserves.

 

This is arguably libelous. The claim that children were put in “cages” originated with left-wingers recycling photos from 2014 — during the Obama administration — and the influx of Central American “refugees” trying to exploit a loophole in U.S. immigration law created an unprecedented crisis at the border, for which Nielsen was not to blame.

Leaving aside this dishonest smear by the scummy Toobin, the real news in this story is that Nielsen, who is plenty tough, was not tough enough to keep Trump happy, so that her resignation probably signals a crackdown on the border so severe that it will make the past year’s “children in cages” episode seem like a picnic by comparison.



 

Tucker Carlson: CNN Dutifully Follows ‘Marching Orders’ From Nancy Pelosi

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In his Wednesday opening monologue, Tucker Carlson explained that the real collusion is between Democrats and the “mainstream” media:

This past Sunday afternoon, we learned that the Trump campaign did not collude with the government of Russia. That was the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation, an investigation that spent two years exhaustively looking into the question. This was very good news for America — we don’t have a spy in the White House. But it was apocalyptic for the Democratic Party and their press agents in the news media.
These are the people who would stake their reputations and their fortunes on the collusion hoax — and they were stunned. Befuddled politicians stammered on television, trying to figure out what to say about the news. Viewers of liberal media outlets didn’t want to hear anything about it. Huge numbers of them just quit watching immediately. On Tuesday night, CNN’s 8 p.m. show lost nearly 50 percent of its viewers.
For progressive channels, this was a catastrophe. Something had to be done. So into this disaster steps the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. On Monday, just hours after the collusion story collapsed, Pelosi announced that the Democratic Party would be switching gears. Going forward, Democrats would focus intently on health care, just like she disingenuously claimed they always had.
“We’ve never taken our focus away,” she said. “I hope that it focuses the press on these issues.”
“I hope the press focuses healthcare,” Pelosi said. She didn’t have to ask twice. At CNN, they were paying close attention to every word Pelosi uttered. To Jeff Zucker and the anchors who work for him at CNN, Pelosi isn’t just a politician, she’s the leader of the party — their party. The party under whose banner Zucker has said he may someday run for office.
When America’s most powerful Democrat speaks, CNN listens with pen in hand. These are marching orders, and the network swung into action immediately. The rundowns of every primetime show were scrapped and rebuilt. Gone were the segments about office towers in Moscow and Carter Page’s spying and Don Jr. going to prison. In their place, long editorials about health care. The Democratic health care plan is sensible and necessary, CNN told us. The Republican plan — cruel and heartless. . . .
Democratic officials pick the topic and the storyline. Their servants in cable news dutifully repeat it to the word, all day long.
CNN is not a news outlet, it’s a super PAC. It is running unregulated campaign ads 24 hours a day.

Watch the video:



 

‘Creepy Porn Lawyer’ Michael Avenatti Arrested by Feds in Extortion Scheme

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It this the best week ever, or what?

The arrest Monday of Michael Avenatti in an extortion case reportedly linked to fellow celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos sparked trouble for two men who recently had been fixtures on cable news, especially CNN.
Avenatti, the pugnacious attorney best known for representing adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Trump, was arrested on charges that included trying to shake down Nike for as much as $25 million with a co-conspirator by threatening the company with bad publicity. The attorney, who also was accused of embezzling a client’s money to pay his own expenses, was charged with extortion and bank and wire fraud in separate cases in New York and California. He was arrested in New York.
The suspected co-conspirator was identified by The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal as Geragos, a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer also known for his work with celebrities. CNN, which had hired him as a contributor, cut ties with him Monday.
In a span of just over two months last year, Avenatti appeared 108 times on just two cable news outlets combined: CNN and MSNBC, as the Washington Free Beacon reported. He showed up on CNN 65 times and on MSNBC 43 times between March 7 and May 10 [2018] . . .
He also made headlines when he briefly explored the idea of a presidential bid last year.
In fact, CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter told Avenatti last year: “One reason I’m taking you seriously as a contender is because of your presence on cable news.”

Media exposure has cash value: “Free Beacon estimated Avenatti earned around $175 million in free media from the news networks.”

 

Since 2016, an anti-Trump industry has sprung up, with CNN and MSNBC as major components of that machinery, cranking out hour after hour of fear and loathing of the president. Michael Avenatti was among those who cashed in by supplying raw material for the cable-news Trump-haters, and the media vendors of this product bear responsibility for elevating the “Creepy Porn Lawyer” to nationwide celebrity status.

Ace: “Come on — aren’t you getting a little tired of #Winning?”



 

CNN’s Ratings Are SO LOW …

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Ace of Spades calls attention to the latest cable-news ratings, as reported by @RoadMN on Twitter, and it really is astonishing how bad CNN ratings are. It’s not just the fact that Fox News is stomping the crap out of CNN in prime time where, for example, Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. ET audience (3.14 million viewers) is three times larger than Anderson Cooper’s (1.03 million). CNN’s ratings are so low that no show on the network rates higher than 28th in all cable news programming.

 

(You can click that graphic to enlarge full-size.)

You see that the highest-rated hour on CNN (Chris Cuomo at 9 p.m. ET) has an audience of 1.11 million, which is not only dwarfed by Sean Hannity’s audience (3.3 million), but is also smaller than, for example, the 7 a.m. hour of Fox & Friends (1.47 million). The audience for CNN’s morning programming is microscopic — New Day, hosted by Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, gets barely half a million viewers.

How can words convey just how pathetic CNN’s numbers are? You’re talking about a national network, with anchors earning millions annually, supported by a vast staff of reporters, producers, editors and technicians. And at 8 a.m. ET, Camerota and Berman are viewed by an audience of 567,000. By comparison, Olivia Jade Giannulli, the vapid airhead whose mother cheated to get her into college, has 1.9 million YouTube subscribers. That’s right — this idiot teenager can post a makeup tutorial that gets more than twice the viewers of CNN’s New Day.

CNN has no viable commercial purpose. There are many YouTube channels with larger audiences — PewDiePie routinely gets 4 million views. If a Swedish comedian on YouTube is four times more popular than your cable-news network, the word for this is failure.



 

Category: CNN

CNN Commentator Fired After U.N. Speech Endorsing Anti-Israel Violence

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The usual suspects on the Left are upset that Professor Mark Lamont Hill lost his contract as a CNN commentator Thursday — he remains on the payroll of Temple University — but he said what he said:

CNN Contributor Marc Lamont Hill told the United Nations on Wednesday that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state, and defended the Palestinian use of violence against Israel.
Hill was speaking at the “U.N. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which provides an annual platform for extremist rhetoric against Israel. He was present to express his views as an “invited representative of civil society.” . . .
Hill referred to the founding of Israel in May 1948 as “the great catastrophe,” borrowing the term “Nakba,” which is used by Palestinians. . . . Hill continued with various other accusations against Israel, adding that he had refused to drink “Israeli water” on a flight from “Palestine” to New York. . . .

[Quoting Hill’s speech:] Solidarity from the international community demands that we embrace boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as a critical means by which to hold Israel accountable for its treatment of Palestinian people. . . .
Black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Gandhi and nonviolence. Rather, slave revolts and self-defense and tactics otherwise divergent from Dr. King or Mahatma Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom. We must allow—if we are to operate in true solidarity with Palestinian people, we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility. If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself. We must prioritize peace. But we must not romanticize or fetishize it. . . .
So as we stand here on the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the tragic commemoration of the Nakba, we have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international action that will give us what justice requires. And that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Israel either has the right to exist, or it doesn’t, and Marc Lamont Hill quite clearly denies Israel’s right to exist. It would ill behoove Hill to claim his remarks were “taken out of context,” because we have the full transcript of his speech, and it does not exonerate him.

Many conservatives have been purged or marginalized for saying things less obviously hateful than what Hill said, and his known association with Louis Farrakhan adds weight to the charge of anti-Semitism.

If you’re going to demand that we “recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself,” shouldn’t this principle extend beyond Israel? And if 70 years is not enough time to ratify Israel’s territorial sovereignty, how long will it take? What other historic conquests will you delegitimize? What other “occupied people” will you encourage to use violence to resist their conquerors? What about the people of Texas, a formerly independent republic? What about British rule in Northern Ireland? Would Mark Lamont Hill endorse a secessionist uprising in Texas or a renewal of anti-British terrorism by the IRA?

This is where everyone might benefit from reading Thomas Sowell’s Conquests and Cultures: An International History, which makes the point that being an “occupied people” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some conquests are objectively better than others. We might observe that the Germans were an “occupied people” after losing World War II, but the Allied occupation of Germany was better than the previous Nazi occupation of Poland. The fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union instituted a new totalitarian occupation of Eastern Europe after Hitler’s defeat is arguably the source of the confusion in Marc Lamont Hill’s mind. Why? Because Soviet propaganda justified the Iron Curtain and the Cold War by claiming America under Harry Truman was a “fascist” power, and this anti-American ideology took root on the Left. During the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War, every U.S. ally was targeted for such smears by Soviet propaganda, which was parroted by the Left in America and other Western countries. This is how and why Palestinian nationalism became a cause célèbre on the Left in the late 1960s, becauses the Soviets were always eager to exploit any Third World conflict for their own advantage, and therefore furnished weapons to Israel’s enemies.

The Left’s hatred of Israel is a legacy of this Soviet propaganda, and you might notice that the British stopped having problems with IRA terrorism not long after the Soviet Union collapsed. Coincidence? No, it is a fact that the KGB smuggled weapons to the IRA, in the same way that they smuggled weapons to Palestinian terrorists in Israel.

More than 25 years after the Soviet Union ended up in “the ash heap of history,” just as Ronald Reagan had predicted, the poisonous seeds of Soviet propaganda continue to produce tainted fruit. In fact, this decaying fruit becomes more toxic with each passing year because of the “intersectionality” of identity politics promoted on our university campuses by left-wing academics like Professor Hill. Consider this passage from his speech Wednesday at the United Nations:

What I’m challenging us to do in the spirit of solidarity is not to embrace optimism but to embrace radical hope. Radical hope is a belief that despite the odds, despite the considerable measures against justice and peace, despite the legacy of hatred and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and homophobia, despite these systems of power that have normalized settler colonialism, despite these structures, we can still win. We can still prevail.
One motivation for my hope in the liberation and ultimate self-determination of the Palestinian people comes in August of 2014. Black Americans were in Ferguson, Missouri in the Midwest of the United States protesting the death of a young man named Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American male who had been killed by a law enforcement agent. And as we protested, I saw two things that provided hope for the Palestinian struggle. One was that for the first time in my entire life of activism I saw a sea of Palestinian people. I saw a sea or Palestinian flags in the crowd saying that we must form a solidarity project. We must struggle together in order to resist because state violence in the United States and state violence in Brazil and state violence is Syria and state violence in Egypt and state violence in South Africa, and state violence in Palestine are all of the same sort. And we finally understood that we must work together and not turn on each other, but instead turn to each other.
And later that night when the police began to tear gas us, Mariam Barghouti tweeted us from Ramallah. She, along with other Palestinian youth activists, told us that they tear gas that we were experiencing was only temporary. They gave us tips for how to wash our eyes out. They told us how to make gas masks out of t-shirts. They gave us permission to think and dream beyond our local conditions by giving us a transnational or a global solidarity project.

If “global solidarity” were to yield “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” as Professor Hill so ardently hopes, are we to suppose that this “liberated” Palestine would be free from “patriarchy and homophobia”? Perhaps the women and girls raped by ISIS and the homosexuals persecuted in Iran would disagree with Professor Hill’s “radical hope.”

Furthermore, what are we to conclude from Professor Hill’s assertion that the Ferguson riots were analogous to the Palestinian “struggle”? Couldn’t this be interpreted as an endorsement of anti-white terrorism in the United States? And if arresting a robbery suspect — which is what Michael Brown was — is intolerable “state violence,” then isn’t Professor Hill delegitimizing all law enforcement? Officer Darren Wilson was exonerated after evidence showed that Brown was shot after attempting to take the officer’s gun while resisting arrest. The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative promoted by the #BlackLivesMatter movement was a lie — a bogus propaganda claim — and yet here we are, more than four years later, with Professor Hill preaching that lie at the United Nations!

CNN, which devoted many hours of coverage to promoting #BlackLivesMatter propaganda in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere, has cut loose Professor Hill, but it has not repudiated its allegiance to the Left, and so we can expect still more poisoned fruit from that toxic tree.

UPDATE: Ace is on the warpath against Dan McLaughlin and other “conservatives” who defend CNN because of their totally-not-gay crushes on Jake Tapper.