CNN's Top-Five Credibility Catastrophes of 2013
by John Nolte 17 Dec 2013
This was supposed to be a
rebuilding year for the former Most Trusted Name In News. The belief was that CNN's ratings couldn't sink much lower
than its 2012 lows and that newly-installed president Jeff Zucker couldn't possibly make things worse.
Wrong.
After months of retooling, CNN is
still in last place and its primetime viewership has improbably sunk even
further.
So what went wrong? How did Zucker
and CNN bungle things so badly that after hitting what everyone was sure was
bottom in 2012, a new bottom was found in 2013?
Well, in reality, ratings are the
least of the network's problems. Thanks to one breathtaking debacle after
another, CNN now has a credibility problem from which it is unlikely to ever
recover. And here are the top five reasons why….
1. Exploiting Tragedy After
Tragedy to Push an Anti-Gun Agenda
Piers Morgan is a unmitigated
disaster for CNN; a shrill, low-rated, not-too-bright, carnival-barking leftist
and symbol of everything wrong with the network. But when it came to exploiting
the murders of schoolchildren to push an anti-gun agenda, CNN didn't
compartmentalize this to its left-wing limey.
In the wake of the horrific
mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, there was almost no difference between
the gun control push on CNN and MSNBC -- except of course for the fact that
MSNBC is honest about its agenda. In the days leading up to a largely symbolic
Senate vote on tightening background checks (that failed), CNN was caught
red-handed sucking up to its elite media colleagues with a promise to devote a
full day of coverage to pressure Congress into restricting our Second Amendment
civil rights.
This happened in early April, just
a couple of months after Zucker took over. And any of us who hoped Zucker might
work to correct CNN's bias problems would never make that mistake again.
2. The Great Trayvon Martin Race
Hoax
It is a little unfair that only
NBC is remembered for fabricating evidence to make George Zimmerman (who was
acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin) look racist. Arguably, what
CNN did was just as bad or worse. In April of 2012, The Most Trusted Name In
News told its audience that Zimmerman had referred to Martin as a "f*cking
coon" during a 911 call on the night of the shooting. Other than wishful
thinking, CNN had no evidence of this and once the evidence did come in (Zimmerman
said nothing of the sort), the network was forced to walk it back.
CNN's determination to push its
left-wing race hoax, however, never waned, and charged right into 2013.
With as much zeal as the openly
left-wing MSNBC, CNN used the Zimmerman trial to pretend the tragic shooting
said something bigger about American race relations. To push a completely
fabricated black vs. white racial narrative, CNN referred to the Hispanic
Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic" and on a daily basis lied through omission
by downplaying or outright ignoring Zimmerman's color blind past and his being
cleared of any kind of a racial motive by a Justice Department investigation.
To make matters worse, CNN
broadcast Zimmerman's personal information (including his Social Security number),
and had a grotesque, full-blown on-air orgasm every time their fellow
race-hoaxer Barack Obama exploited the case for his own cynical racial ends.
Nothing, however, will ever top a
CNN anchor breaking down into tears live on the air.
Once Zimmerman was acquitted, the
network went on to make an even bigger fool of itself. It covered the
post-verdict protests as though they weren't total flops, dabbled in the
desperate "white privilege" after-narrative, and then tried to make
the Zimmerman case about Florida's Stand Your Ground law, even though Stand
Your Ground had as much to do with the Zimmerman case as objectivity and
competence does with CNN.
With the Zimmerman case, CNN fell
on its face in 2012 and then used 2013 to try and dig itself out by chewing on
the dirt.
It was kind of glorious.
3. The Boston Bombing Debacle - For a very short
time, it looked as though CNN had a chance of moving into second place ahead of
MSNBC, especially during the kind of big news events where CNN once excelled.
That all changed during the
coverage of the Boston Marathon terror attack when we all watched in real-time
as CNN melted down before our very eyes.
CNN wasn't the only network to
spread misinformation in the hours and days after the terror bombing, but no
one did it quite as spectacularly as this.
While number one and two on this
list did little to hurt CNN with a mainstream media that shares its left-wing
politics, this surreal meltdown did, and rightly so.
4. 'New Day': The Sure-Thing That
Wasn't - Jeff Zucker made his name
ushering in the era of "The Today Show's" ratings dominance.
Therefore, if there was anything he should have known how to do it was create a
successful morning show.
"New Day" is by far the
most high-profile investment Zucker has yet to make in his programming changes,
and it is an absolute train wreck. After five-months on the air, "New
Day" is hitting new lows -- lows even lower than last year's lowly lows.
Thus far, in his very own
wheelhouse, the new CNN chief is inspiring only despair.
5. Zucker Junior-Gate - Because
CNN is still only one of three cable networks, and almost everyone in online
and print media wants to be on TV, this scandal involving Jeff Zucker's 14
year-old son did not get a hundredth of the media attention it would have if it
were Roger Ailes' son.
Regardless, New Media still
managed to spread the word and the mainstream media knows -- they know that
Zucker's 14-year-old son was put on the board of a rising Democrat star's shady
Internet start-up company.
By virtue of his politics and the
clubby narcissism of the left-wing mainstream media, Zucker dodged having to
deal with what might have been the biggest media scandal of 2013.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t
happen.
--
Recently, Zucker and CNN announced
that they have pretty much thrown in the towel on being a news channel. Whether
aping the Discovery Channel will work
for CNN or not, time will tell. But you cannot be a successful news network
with zero credibility, so CNN really has no other choice than to try and remake
itself.
Jeff Zucker
Jeff
Zucker is the president for CNN
Worldwide, and a director at the Robin
Hood Foundation.
Note: Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Robin Hood Foundation, the Aspen
Institute (think tank), and the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (think tank).
George
Soros is the chairman for the Foundation
to Promote Open Society.
Walter
Isaacson is the president & CEO for the Aspen Institute (think tank), and was the chairman & CEO for CNN.
CNN Worldwide is
a division of CNN.
Ted
Turner is the founder of CNN,
and the co-chairman for the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (think tank).
Jessica Tuchman Mathews is a director
at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think
tank), the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(think tank), a director at the American Friends of Bilderberg
(think tank), and a 2008 Bilderberg conference participant (think tank).
Ed Griffin’s interview with
Norman Dodd in 1982
(The investigation into the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace uncovered the plans for population
control by involving the United
States in war)
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