Last week I teed off on CNN after one of their high-profile hosts, the somewhat cartoonish Brian Stelter, expressed disillusionment over how people could trust independent podcast voices like Joe Rogan rather than "serious news rooms" like CNN. For the record, I'm not sure that America's collective eyeballs have rolled back down into their original position yet.
That anyone at CNN could be so insular that they struggle to understand why their network isn't trusted by the people of this country seems impossible, and I laid out a litany of reasons why in the aforementioned video.
In an effort to counter the ratings juggernaut that is Fox News, CNN hired Jeff Zucker (who recently resigned his position due to ethics violations) to rebrand its entire identity to be a center-left political propaganda operation. They willfully blurred the lines between reporting and opinion, something Fox – for all its hysterics and silliness is careful not to do – and began jockeying with MSNBC to become the cable news world's "anti-Fox."
That competition resulted in a precipitous slide further and further left, including the elevation of hosts that specialized in faux outrage and the manipulative presentation of information. The result? CNN is watched by fewer people than the Home Shopping Network, and its most familiar faces are out whining about people listening to the pop culture podcast of an MMA fanatic.
While there's a part of me that wants to gloat about the network reaping its just desserts, I am pressed by the awareness that it is such a waste. CNN has the resources, the manpower, and the opportunity to do something that is essential to not just the flourishing but the very preservation of a free society. I'll give an example.
Along with pointing out the numerous and annoying flaws associated with the network, I think it's both valuable and important to point out when they get something right. And this? This is exactly the kind of actual journalism that a free press, committed to the preservation of free expression will do:
The world's eyes are on Beijing right now. For those who are suffering under its brutally oppressive hand, such a moment represents maybe their best opportunity to be seen or heard. The International Olympic Committee is a corrupt organization firmly in the pocket of anti-democratic forces that use the IOC's complicity to compel participating athletes to censor all advocacy for human rights and liberation.
To their shame, the Olympic television partner NBC has apparently agreed to play by those censorious rules. And here's Jake Tapper and CNN working diligently to expose the truth. It's a service not just to the world of real journalism, not just to China's victims, but to the cause of freedom itself.
When you stop and consider it, this is the kind of actual news coverage that should make those peddling things like the fake outrage over Joe Rogan's podcast feel petty, tabloidish, and journalistically humiliated.
Consider for a moment the news room that starts dolling out coverage assignments and says,
"Okay this team needs to get on the international sports competition that is meant to celebrate global unity and peace being hosted in the most notoriously oppressive and human rights violating nation on earth, and then, let's see, you guys take Sharon Stone calling Joe Rogan an ‘a-hole.'"
There's entertainment hysterics, and there's journalism. The two are not the same, and the presence of the former, just like the opinions of left-wing propagandists being passed off as news coverage, greatly diminishes the seriousness with which people are willing to take the latter.
That's a real shame for everybody.
