Category: CNN

Confirmed: CNN Is Garbage

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As if any further confirmation were needed:

Chris Cuomo, host of CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, used his media sources to dig up info on his brother, former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s, sexual harassment accusers, according to texts and interview transcripts recently revealed.
Text messages released by New York Attorney General Letitia James show Chris Cuomo had frequent contact with Melissa DeRosa, Andrew Cuomo’s top aide at the time.
In early March, the New York Times reported that the former governor tried kissing a woman, Anna Ruch, without her consent. Three days after this report, Chris Cuomo texted DeRosa, “I have a lead on the wedding girl.”
Other messages indicated Chris Cuomo’s willingness to help with his brother’s response and preparation on the sexual harassment allegations. “Please let me help with the prep,” Cuomo told DeRosa in one text.
In another text, Chris Cuomo sent DeRosa a fully written statement for the governor to use publicly . . .

He was writing objective journalism for his brother, the Democratic politician. What’s beautiful about this is how Letitia James, a black woman, is releasing this information to destroy the white “Boys Club” that has so long controlled the Democratic Party in New York.

The formula by which the Cuomo machine operated involved pandering to women and minorities in order to elect white guys with a “D” beside their names. A key part of this formula was a messaging strategy that relied on accusations of sexism and racism against Republicans. “Vote for us,” said Democrats like Cuomo, “because we care about you.” And of course, the Cuomo machine had the enthusiastic cooperation of the media is promulgating this message, which is where having the governor’s brother as CNN anchor was so convenient.

Such a strategy is ultimately doomed, for the simple reason that eventually women and minorities stop being content with the representation provided by “caring” Democratic white guys, and reach to take power in their own names. Once the Democratic Party no longer functions as a vehicle for the personal ambitions of liberal white guys, the political landscape is permanently altered. Look at the plight of Beto O’Rourke in Texas, for example; he keeps offering himself as the “white savior” of Texas Democrats, but can’t win elections, because the raison d’être of the Texas Democratic party is its anti-white/anti-male ideology: If it’s not about hating white guys, why bother voting at all?

Organizing on the basis of identity politics, as Democrats have done, requires banishing white men from positions of party leadership. Eventually, then, “white Democrat” must become a non-existent category, and Democrats refuse to see where this is leading them.

The riptides that dragged Andrew Cuomo under the waves are now swirling around Chris Cuomo, and he won’t remain afloat much longer.




 

Category: CNN

CNN: Failure, Denial and Nostalgia

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John Nolte ripped CNN a new one Tuesday, pointing out the laughable bogusness of the failing network’s recent polls, and Ace of Spades did a happy dance over CNN’s abysmal ratings — they don’t even reach a million viewers for most of their primetime shows. There are YouTube podcasters and teenagers on TikTok with bigger audiences than CNN.

Why hasn’t Jeff Zucker been fired yet? Is there any realistic possibility that CNN will get better under Zucker’s continued leadership? If they’ve just decided to accept permanent residence in the cable-ratings basement — literally, CNN is losing to Paw Patrol reruns on Nick Jr. — it probably doesn’t matter who’s running the show, but what’s the point of airing “news” that nobody watches? And what kind of “news” is it?

Yesterday was one of those days when I decided to watch CNN (so you don’t have to) and their Big Story — leading every hour, the subject of breathless “reporting” and multiple discussions with Trump-hating panelists — was that Nancy Pelosi’s special January 6th committee had issued subpoenas to 10 former Trump administration officials.

Very simple question: Who cares?

Maybe CNN’s 600,000 or so hardcore viewers are permanently fascinated with the Capitol “insurrection,” but how is it top-of-the-hour news that Pelosi is continuing her pointless witch hunt into something that happened 10 months ago? I say this witch hunt is pointless because the Justice Department has already investigated and is prosecuting more than 600 people who were involved in the “insurrection.” So what exactly is Pelosi’s handpicked committee investigating? What is the rationale of this inquiry that justifies issuing all these subpoenas? What do Democrats (and their pals at CNN) expect to find?

It’s not my habit to boast about sources, but a person with direct knowledge described it to me as the “fishing expedition from hell.”

Pelosi’s committee is asking all these people to turn over every email, text message and whatever else might relate to the “Stop the Steal” rally despite the fact that none of the people being subpoenaed had anything to do with the crowd rampaging through the Capitol on Jan. 6.

If you are inside the echo chamber where CNN viewers dwell, you know that their fear and loathing of Trump is obsessive, and that they (at least claim to) believe that the “Big Lie” — the belief that Biden didn’t really win the 2020 election — is a Threat to Our Democracy. From their (objectively deranged) perspective, getting to the bottom of Jan. 6 is necessary to driving a stake through the heart of this threat.

But it’s all a snipe hunt, a pursuit of imaginary phantoms. While it may be true that some kooks (including Trump himself, apparently) believed Vice President Mike Pence could thwart congressional ratification of the Electoral College vote, that is a separate matter from the gut-hunch suspicion of many voters — myself included — that Democrat shenanigans of one sort or another tipped the 2020 election to Biden. In other words, even if we don’t believe Biden was really elected president, we have to accept that it was not possible to prove massive voter fraud in a timeframe that could prevent him from being inaugurated.

We don’t want to overthrow the U.S. government for this. We’re not a bunch of wacky conspiracy theorists; we continue our lives as law-abiding citizen, despite our beliefs about cheating in 2020.

Most Republican voters are unhappy with this situation, but we’re not crazy — and that’s something CNN doesn’t want to admit. They want their audience to believe that every GOP voter is a fringe character like that bare-chested QAnon shaman or the militia wackos. As evidenced by CNN dwindling audience, there’s not much market demand for this kind of “news,” but Jake Tapper, Brian Stelter and the rest of their crew are committed to promulgating this paranoid worldview, where the “Big Lie” is an existential Threat to Our Democracy.

What CNN can’t accept — the reason they keep up this mindless Trump Derangement Syndrome drumbeat, despite ratings that indicate everybody’s sick and tired of it — is that Biden’s presidency is a failure of world-historic proportions. No matter how much they hate Trump, that doesn’t change the fact that Biden is demonstrably incompetent (and perhaps, also, incontinent). What they’re doing is a sort of Cargo Cult ritual, an attempt to bring about a return of the Nielsen magic by doing what they did during the Trump years. It’s a nostalgia trip, really, a yearning for a lost Golden Age, when CNN took pride in being leaders of the #Resistance: “Old times there are not forgotten.”

Alas for Jake Tapper, Brian Stelter and their friends, the world has moved on, and CNN’s Golden Age ain’t coming back. Yet they remain huddled inside their cocoon, telling each other how relevant they are, how they’re Making a Difference and Defending Our Democracy.

Their response to cognitive dissonance is denial, which is understandable from a psychiatric perspective, but isn’t much of a business strategy.

But is CNN really in the “news” business anymore? Don’t they function as a sort of ongoing contribution-in-kind to the Democratic Party, proving them with 24/7 free advertising to promote (what they conceive to be) narratives favorable to the party’s political interests?

And one other thing: Remember how CNN (and the rest of the liberal media) kept riding the “Russian collusion” hoax all the way through the 2018 midterm elections? Do they imagine that they can use the January 6 “insurrection” the same way, keeping up the hysteria into 2022?

“Insurrection now! Insurrection tomorrow! Insurrection forever!”

Yeah, well, good luck with that. Nobody’s watching this sad carnival.




 

Category: CNN

‘Jetpack Joe’ and the CNN Town Hall

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There were many weird moments during this week’s CNN town hall event with Joe Biden in Baltimore, but the one that attracted universal comment was the “Jetpack Joe” episode. CNN host Anderson Cooper was asking Biden about inflation, which took about 20 seconds, during which time Biden stood with his fists clenched and his elbows locked at a 90-degree angle, as if piloting an imaginary jetpack, causing the hashtag #JetpackJoe to trend on Twitter. Others compared Biden’s posture to the Beavis & Butthead character Cornholio: “TP for my bunghole!”

It was pointed out in real time that this clenched-fist posture is symptomatic of Alzheimer’s, but even if you didn’t know that, you could see how Biden was struggling to concentrate on the (prescreened) questions as he attempted to remember his (scripted) answers.

You might be wondering why Team Biden would risk exposing the elderly dementia patient to such ridicule, but this limited exposure — let’s face it, any bright seventh-grader could field those softball questions from Anderson Cooper — is part of the overall “Hiding Biden” strategy.

They did the same thing during their 2020 basement campaign. If your frail and feeble-minded septuagenarian candidate lacks the stamina and presence of mind to handle a full public schedule, part of the secret of successfully shielding him from scrutiny is to have him do occasional appearances in controlled environments, e.g., a 20-minute speech at a labor union convention: “See? He’s not hiding — he’s right here, reading aloud the script we prepared for him.”

It has been 100 days since Biden held a press conference (July 15) and this staged CNN event with Anderson Cooper was an obvious attempt to postpone any such high-risk engagement, by providing the public a simulacrum of spontaneous response to issue-related questions. If you tuned into CNN on Friday, you would have seen them using a few short clips from this town hall as the basis for “news” reporting, while completely ignoring the numerous awkward moments when Biden babbled like an idiot. The CNN event served the propaganda purpose for which it was intended, and was therefore a “win” for Team Biden.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this — the audience for Biden’s CNN town hall was about 1.2 million viewers, less than half the size of the audience that was watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News.

It is difficult to quantify the diminution of CNN’s influence, now that their hourly primetime audience is often less than 1 million viewers. But here’s a telling comparison: Joe Rogan‘s podcast has 144 million subscribers, and about 7 million daily listeners.




 

CNN ‘Stepped Up,’ Covered Avenatti Prison Sentence, MSNBC Didn’t

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Credit where credit is due — the Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck notes that CNN covered the story of former Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti being sentenced to prison on extortion charges, while MSNBC continued to ignore Avenatti’s downfall. So CNN (where Avenatti made 122 appearances during his 2018 heyday as an anti-Trump hero) has more journalistic integrity than MSNBC (where Avenatti made 108 appearances). To describe a media organization as being “better than MSNBC” is to damn them with faint praise, of course. Still, it’s a tiny glimmer of encouragement that Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer show some measure of penance for their network’s shameful role in publicizing an obvious sleazeball like Avenatti, merely because he said bad things about Donald Trump. MSNBC appears to be without shame.




 

CNN’s ‘Hero’ Voter Is a Felon

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On “Super Tuesday” last year, CNN celebrated a Houston voter, Hervis Rogers, who stood in line for hours to vote in the Democratic primary:

“I figured like it was my duty to vote. I wanted to get my vote in to voice my opinion. And I wasn’t going to let nothing stop me. So I waited it out,” Hervis Rogers told CNN’s Ed Lavandera early Wednesday morning after casting his ballot at a polling center located at Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston.
Asked how long he had waited for to vote, Rogers said: “About six hours. A little bit over six hours.”
Rogers was among scores of voters who experienced long lines at some polling centers in Texas, where the state has shut down hundreds of polling sites in the last decade, contributing to the long lines at some of the remaining locations.

Notice that long lines at polling places are a crucial part of the liberal media’s “voter suppression” narrative, insinuating that this is some sinister conspiracy by Republican racists. Not even CNN, however, bothered to explain why those evil Texas racists would be “suppressing” votes in a Democratic primary, but CNN’s audience wouldn’t recognize sound logic if they ever saw it, which they seldom do. At any rate, what about this Hervis Rogers, who was so proud to do his “duty” by voting for Democrats? Have you got your shocked face ready?

Hervis Rogers is a convicted felon, who was on probation at the time he voted for Democrats last year — twice, once in the primary and then again in November — and Rogers was arrested this week for illegally voting, which is also a felony in Texas. Now, ask yourself this question: If convicted felons are prohibited from voting, then how was it that Hervis Rogers was on the list of registered voters in Houston?

If convicted felons were permitted to vote illegally in Houston, what about Atlanta? Milwaukee? Phoenix? Philadelphia? The point here, see, is that making sure election laws are enforced is a job of local officials, but because Democrats control all the election offices in major cities, we have no idea how many people are voting illegally in those cities, because Democrats have no interest in actually enforcing election laws.




 

Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

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January headline from The Babylon Bee:

CNN Unveils New Format
Where Hosts Just Watch Fox News
And Yell At It

This is awfully close to describing what’s happened to CNN in recent months. Once Biden was inaugurated, the network lost its raison d’être of producing anti-Trump propaganda. Ratings for CNN have evaporated since January and, unable to excite their audience with live performances of journalistic fellatio on Biden (metaphorically speaking), they devote hours every day to critiquing whatever is on Fox News.

 

So the other night, Tucker Carlson raised questions about whether the number of deaths from COVID-19 vaccine are being underreported. He didn’t advance any “conspiracy theory” during that segment, or make claims that could justify Sanjay Gupta’s unhinged reaction:

“What he’s done is he’s basically looked at these open-system adverse reporting systems and said ‘hey look, this suggests that 30 people a day are dying of the vaccine.’ Absolutely not true,” Gupta said on CNN’s New Day.
“The problem is that it continues to stir up this vaccine hesitance or outright vaccine reluctance . . .

Hey, Dr. Gupta: Maybe “vaccine hesitance” doesn’t really matter, but do you really care about Fox News viewers? No, I’m pretty sure you would be very happy if they all died tomorrow. So please spare us your concern-trolling. My thought all along has been that the draconian lockdown regimes and mandatory mask-wearing orders, at best, didn’t do much to stop the pandemic and quite possibly made it worse. Anyone can examine the state-by-state per-capita death rates and see that there is no clear correlation between the severity of the lockdown regimes and the relative safety of populations. Florida is doing just fine, despite all the hate directed at Gov. DeSantis by CNN and other liberal media outlets that prophesied a catastrophe in the Sunshine State.

Nor do I think that Biden’s manic insistence that everybody must get vaccinated before life can return to normal is justified. Those who are most at risk from the virus — the elderly and those with health issues that might make them vulnerable — need to get vaccinated, but healthy young people have a near-zero risk of death from COVID-19 and it’s senseless to require them to get the vaccine. So whatever Tucker Carlson says about vaccine-related deaths probably won’t make much difference one way or another in the overall fight against the pandemic. What it may do (and this is what the Democrats who run CNN are really concerned about) is give some Republican lawmakers encouragement to resist efforts by the Biden administration to make vaccination mandatory.

They’re telegraphing their punches, so to speak. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see where they’re going with this. At some point — maybe in a few weeks, maybe this fall — the Biden administration will claim that too many people are refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and measures will be introduced to punish the unvaccinated. At that point, questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine will be very relevant to arguments by opponents of these punitive measures.

I’m not an “anti-vaxxer,” but I do know people who’ve had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine — not fatal, but not pleasant. Lots of people say that second Moderna shot is a doozy. Personally, I’ve never gotten the flu vaccine, because I have confidence in my immune system. About once a year, I get the common cold or the flu — it’s hard to tell the difference, and I don’t really care which it is — and I go through a few days of coughing and wheezing before I get better. No big deal. Except for that one time in 2011 when I came down with a serious case of bronchitis that scared me pretty bad, I just refuse to worry about stuff like that. Worrying causes stress, and stress is bad for your immune system.

Speaking of worrying, maybe the folks at CNN should worry less about what Tucker Carlson says and worry more about why their network sucks. “Fake news” is the Enemy of the People, you know.




 

Category: CNN

CNN: ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’

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For the past three days, I’ve had the TV in my home office tuned to CNN. This is something I do occasionally, just to see what the world looks like to people who get their news from the liberal media. One thing I noticed is that, during about two dozen hours of programming over three days, not once did anyone on CNN refer to the current crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. It reminds me of what Jim Treacher said:

“Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.”

If the only source of news you had was CNN, you would have no idea of the unprecedented havoc at our nation’s southern border:

Border Patrol agents apprehended nearly 170,000 migrants in March who illegally crossed the border into the United States. This represents an increase of nearly 72 percent in one month.
During the month of March, Border Patrol agents took 168,195 migrants after they illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico according to the Southwest Land Border Encounters report released on Thursday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“CBP has experienced an increase in encounters and arrests. This is not new. Encounters have continued to increase since April 2020, and our past experiences have helped us be better prepared for the challenges we face this year,” said CBP Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner Troy Miller in a written statement. . . .
CBP reports apprehending 30,389 migrants in March 2020. The March 2021 apprehension of 168,195 represents an increase of more than 450 percent over last year. Compared to the 2019 migrant border crisis, the apprehensions sat at 92,833. . . .
Last month, agents apprehended 18,663 Unaccompanied Alien Children (up from 9,271 in February), 52,904 Family Unit Aliens (up from 19,286), and 96,628 Single Adults (up from 68,992).

Here’s how out of control it’s gotten:

The Biden administration is considering sending cash payments to Central Americans in a bid to prevent them from making the trek north as the US grapples with the worst immigration crisis seen in 20 years, Reuters reported Friday.
The potential cash transfer program would be targeted at residents of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which account for the overwhelming majority of migrants illegally crossing the border, Roberta Jacobson, the White House’s southern border coordinator, told the outlet.

We’re going to give U.S. taxpayer money to foreigners to pay them not to come here illegally? Yeah, but CNN viewers know nothing.




 

Jake Tapper: Still Not Over Macho Grande

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Has it really been 40 years since Airplane? Perhaps younger readers don’t get the “over Macho Grande” reference, but it came to mind as I watched Jake Tapper have a hissy fit after Thursday’s debate, declaring that President Trump “is running the single most negative, sleazy campaign in American history for a major party candidate.”

 

What evidently set Tapper off was that Trump brought up Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”:

“Trump and his allies in the media and the members of his family and the Trump allied websites and such are leveling with charges so heinous I’m not going to say them, just nonsense, crap, tied into QAnon, tied into pizzagate, tied into the worst things you could say about a person.”

Who thinks this way? And why do they think this way?

Trump Derangement Syndrome — for Tapper and others in the media echo chamber, November 8, 2016, is a Date That Will Live in Infamy. That scene in the Javitz Center, the agonized disbelief that the American people had rejected Hillary Clinton? They’re still not over it. They’ll never be over it, just like Ted Striker will never be over Macho Grande.