Category: CNN

Fareed Zakaria Caught Engaging In Act Of Biden-esque Plagiarism And Marcotte-esque Argumentation

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by Smitty

Not only did Fareed Zakaria beclown himself by stealing other’s work in a gun grabber article for Time, but Rames Ponnuru notes that when FZ acts as an intellectual burglar, Fareed thugs the contents trash can:

Fareed Zakaria has tried to make “The Case for Gun Control” in Time. The results are not pretty. Virtually every argument he makes misrepresents the underlying data.

After a lead that cites the Sikh-temple shooting, the Aurora massacre, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, Zakaria trots out the usual international comparisons: “The gun-homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia, 10 times that of India and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would ask, Does America have some potential cause for this that is also off the chart? I doubt that anyone seriously thinks we have 30 times as many crazy people as Britain or Australia. But we do have many, many more guns.”

RTWT. Meanwhile, I got just a teeny bit sarcastic on Twitter:

 

 

 

 

Update: more at Outside the Beltway

CNN President Jim Walton Resigns; Network Stuck in Third Place

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Associated Press:

CNN chief Jim Walton said Friday he is quitting, saying the company needs new leadership at a time its flagship U.S. network is suffering through some of its poorest ratings ever.
Walton built the company into a profitable international news organization in his 10 years as president of CNN Worldwide, and said it is on track for record profits this year. But the U.S. network is the most visible part of the business and is now entrenched in third place behind rivals Fox News Channel and MSNBC in prime time

Let’s see if we can’t locate your problem, OK, Jim?

Your idea of a morning anchor is Soledad O’Brien, and Nielsen ratings indicate she’s slightly more popular than syphilis.

Your primetime anchor is so obviously gay that when he finally “came out,” no one cared. He’s the Liberace of network anchors. NTTAWWT, except that Anderson Cooper’s getting out-gayed (not to mention out-machoed) by Rachel Maddow.

Seriously: Maddow’s Nielsen ratings at 9 p.m. ET on MSNBC (997,000 viewers, 294,000 in the key 25-54 demographic) are better than Cooper’s CNN ratings at 8 p.m. (507K/147K).

In general, Jim — with the exception of hiring Erin Burnett — your eye for on-air talent hasn’t been impressive. There has been a horrible inertia problem at CNN, which has accumulated a bunch of unexciting dead-weight personalities that nobody else wants to hire. I mean, the last time you negotiated Wolf Blitzer’s contract, did you ever get any indication that you were bidding against some other network for his services? If CNN cut Wolf loose next week, is it possible that he might land at NBC or Fox or even Current TV?

In consideration of the facts, Jim, I was rather amused by the self-congratulatory tone of your farewell note:

I am proud of what we have accomplished together over these last 10 years – innovative programming, the development of great talent in front of and behind the cameras, expansion in digital and mobile, significant investment and expansion in international coverage, financial success and, most importantly, great and trusted journalism.  Thank you for the role you have played in our successes.

“Our successes”! If CNN can continue your 10-year record of “successes,” they’ll be lucky to beat Home Shopping Network in the Nielsens.

Category: CNN

Boehner: Obama ‘Picking a Fight Where One Doesn’t Exist’ on Student Loans

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“No one wants student loan interest rates to go up,” House Speaker John Boehner told Candy Crowley in an interview aired today on CNN’s State of the Union. “For the president to politicize this for his own re-election is picking a fight where one doesn’t exist.”

Boehner pointed out that President Obama signed “the payroll tax cut, that included $4 billion worth of reductions in this same program,” and that the administration’s own budget proposal calls for reductions in the student-loan program. Here’s video:

Administration’s Counter-Terrorism Chief Does Three Network Sunday Shows

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Coming up on the first anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, it will be victory-lap time on Fox News Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union and ABC’s This Week, with counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan as the guest. Andrew Malcolm writes:

You remember Brennan as the one rushed out to the White House briefing room the next day to provide the hungry media with their cherished tick-tock account of the commandos’ penetration into Pakistan and the slaying of the instigator of 9/11.
Unfortunately, so eager was the administration to tell its story quickly, that Brennan’s premature enunciation of the event contained numerous details later adjusted or contradicted, detracting from the anticipated accolades.
By now, however, most of the raid confusion is cleared. And everyone knows that the successful killing was mainly the result of Obama’s brave decision, although the SEALs, the stealth helicopter pilots and the Air Force electronic cloaking crews probably helped a little.
Oh, look, it’s an election year!

Sarcastic much? Allahpundit says you should skip the three-network BrennanFest in favor of Bob Schieffer’s lineup on Face the Nation:

CBS looks like the better bet for OBL coverage, though. They’ve got David Ignatius, whose new column argues that the Islamist trend in the Arab Spring has given Bin Laden the last laugh, and Peter Bergen, who interviewed OBL four years before 9/11 and has a new book on the manhunt for him out on Tuesday.

From that David Ignatius column:

Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved. . . .
What we’re seeing now in Egypt is something that might be called electoral bin Ladenism. Take the group Gamaa Islamiya, which under its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Today, the organization has formed a Salafist political party with the benign name Building and Development Party. This organization, which like al-Qaeda traces its roots to the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, has 13 seats in the new Egyptian parliament.

You might also want to check William Jacobson’s argument: “Obama got Osama, but lost the Middle East.”

While you browse your local TV schedule for Sunday show times, a couple more points: CNN’s also has House Speaker John Boehner, while NBC’s Meet the Press goes straight to the presidential campaign, with Ed Gillespie for the Republicans and Robert Gibbs for the Democrats — plus Hilary Rosen and Rachel Maddow!

If any of these people make actual news, I’ll let you know.

CNN’s Jack Cafferty: ‘Lingering Questions About Mormonism … Odd and Insular’

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A steady drip, drip, drip from the major media continues, and notice how this is framed as helpful advice to Mitt Romney:

Now that Mitt Romney is likely the Republican nominee he may begin talking about his Mormon faith. Politico reports a lot of Republicans think he should embrace his Mormonism publicly so people can better understand him. . . .
Mormonism is a big part of who Mitt Romney is. He traveled to France on a two-year mission for the church as a young adult, and who raised his five sons as Mormons and has held several church leadership positions. Nevertheless, Romney doesn’t really like to talk about it. . . .
His aides say he has no immediate plans to make another formal speech at least for now, but maybe he should. It would help clear up lingering questions about Mormonism, a religion that still seems odd and insular to many.
Mormonism has a tainted past that includes racism and polygamy. a CNN/ORC poll taken last October shows 17 percent of Americans would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is a Mormon. That’s not a small number. . . .
Here’s the question: Mitt Romney is a Mormon. How much will it matter?

See? Cafferty’s just askin’ questions. And in the process of asking questions, he brings up the “tainted past” and mentions — oh, just by the way — that Mitt spent two years as a Mormon missionary and “held several church leadership positions.”

Perhaps you didn’t notice how ABC’s Diane Sawyer managed to bring up the same issue in “just-askin’-questions” mode:

Sawyer brought up Romney’s Mormon faith, prompting, “Would you sit down sometime and really talk the two of you about something that holds a lot of curiosity for people?”
Signaling that this would be a campaign issue, she continued, “So, do the people think you’re reluctant to talk about being Mormon?”

These are the overtures to the grand opera, folks. Did you know that last summer, Ron Howard bought the movie rights to Under the Banner of Heaven, a book about murders committed by members of an fundamentalist Mormon extremist splinter group? While there’s no way they could complete a major motion picture before the election, I’m willing to bet stories about the making of the movie will start showing up in the major media this fall.

Drip, drip, drip . . .

In Case You Haven’t Noticed Yet, Everybody Recently Went Crazy

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Everybody but me and you, that is, and one of us is probably on the verge of cracking up under the enormous stress that seems to be driving people off the deep end lately.

Either we’re in the midst of an epidemic of mass hysteria, or else all these people jabbering like magpies on the Internet are describing a reality with which I’ve lost touch, because it makes no sense to me:

Mitt Romney: He’s Inevitable! Electable! Invincible!

Crazy, right? But kooks who believe such things seem to be everywhere nowadays, especially on the Internet:

U.S. Senator Calls President ‘Stupid’ on Twitter

 You don’t even have to look for this stuff. It’s everywhere:

Toddler on Easter egg hunt stumbles on live GRENADE…
which has to be blown up by bomb squad

It’s impossible to parody such madness. For instance, some crazy people still believe stereotypes about black people being good at basketball, but you’d better keep your distance from such wackjobs, or else you’ll never get a job at National Review. (Did somebody say “rim shot”?)

Jeff Goldstein won’t be sending his application to National Review any time soon, because if he was ever in the same room with Rich Lowry, he’d never be able to resist the urge to punch him out.

Some kook — and the Internet’s full of ’em lately, I tell ya — will almost certainly interpret that link as an “endorsement” or “defense” of what John Derbyshire wrote, which is a popular game crazy people play: Demanding that you denounce something somebody else wrote or said or did as if you’re in charge of what other people write, say and do.

Mandatory denunciations were part of the Moscow Show Trials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The attempt to impose intellectual conformity, under threat of denunciation if you don’t conform, is totalitarian. It wasn’t necessarily suprising, then, to find myself today denounced as an Enemy of the People here and there for refusing to agree with Big Brother that We Have Always Been at War With Eastasia. And people seem to be so stressed-out about this that even the mildest disagreement causes them to erupt in fury. You’d never believe the indignant tone of the e-mail I received today from a liberal atheist, to which I tried to respond as calmly as possible:

I made no “assertion that atheists are more likely to be bigots.” I said there was a significant overlap between “the New Atheism” and evolution-based “Scientific Racism,” an overlap of which Derbyshire is an example.
There are certain people — I’ve met them — who have gotten off into the pessimism thing, reading a lot of Nietzsche and Spengler, etc., and thus are filled with a doomsday horror about the Decline of the West, the kind of theme that inspired Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.
While I am not necessarily of the opposing school (which we might call Pollyanna Conservatism), the market for right-wing pessimism is overcrowded already and I never cared much for Nietzsche anyway. If I were offered a six-figure fellowship at the Declinist Foundation for Doom and Gloom, I’d take it, of course, and please let me know if there’s a publisher interested in my idea for a book called Where Are We Going? And Why Are We in This Handbasket?
Nevertheless, I see no reason to apologize for observing that fanatical atheists are usually also fanatical about other things. Some atheists are fanatical environmentalists, and some are fanatical racists. Some of them are even fanatics about bicycling.
Me? I’m just trying to make a living, buddy. And it’s a damn hard dollar.
— RSM

It’s important not to take these liberal kooks too seriously, but at the same time, you want to keep a close eye on them, because you never know when one of them will snap and start spouting profanities and racial slurs on national TV, like Susan Candiotti on CNN:

Piers Morgan: ‘What a Load of Fatuous Nonsense You Speak, Touré, Don’t You?’

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OK, I almost never watch CNN and hadn’t previously had a high opinion of Piers Morgan, but on the other hand, I’d never heard of this Touré character at all, until I saw the Breitbart headline:

MSNBC’s Touré Has Epic
Race-Baiting Meltdown On CNN

So I wondered what the heck this was about. Watch the video:

Touré, whose career has been mainly writing about hiphop music, thought Morgan wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in questioning George Zimmerman’s brother Robert Zimmerman. Morgan objects to being lectured about journalism, and then Touré tries to claim that Morgan doesn’t really know or care anything about the “American soul.” Read the transcript at CNN.

Anyway, I was tired and bummed out and about to go to bed until I saw this and, somehow, it cheered me up wonderfully. Don’t know why.

@Soledad_OBrien’s Unpopularity Destroys Morning Ratings for CNN

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Soledad O’Brien, America’s least-popular cable TV news personality

Executives at CNN must be in shock at the catatrophic implosion of their morning lineup, as Starting Point With Soledad O’Brien (7-9 a.m. weekdays) recorded the cable network’s lowest ratings for that time slot in more than a decade. Fewer than 100,000 adults 25-54 tuned in to O’Brien’s program on an average day, according to the latest quarterly Nielsen numbers.

Inside Cable News called the CNN morning numbers “brutal,” and “an epic ratings collapse,” further adding: “CNN cannot continue to hemorrhage viewers like this much longer without taking drastic corrective action.” While industry observers were amazed by O’Brien’s uprecedented unpopularity, the outspoken liberal host’s historically low ratings were a cause for vengeful celebration by conservatives like the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher:

Every day, @Soledad_OBrien‘s ratings are worse than the last. That means every time you see her, it’s the worst day of her life.

O’Brien inspired widespread mockery from conservatives earlier this month when she embarrassed herself in an attempt to argue with Breitbart.com editor Joel Pollak, whose site exposed President Obama’s ties to the late Professor Derrick Bell, an academic radical notorious for promoting so-called “critical race theory.”

Update (Smitty): linked by Don Surber:

Soledad O’Brien’s unpopularity is symptomatic of how out-of-touch CNN is. The network lost its credibility with conservatives, who are the core audience for cable TV news. MSNBC at least can get frat boy libs to tune in at night. CNN? It has to stick TVs in dental offices, airports and gas chambers to get people to watch. If I were about to be executed, I would say, hurry up. Wolf Blitzer is coming back on.

 


Category: CNN