Lie- lie to my face
Tell me it ain’t no thing, that’s what I wanna hear
Take your lie to the grave
That’s what an old friend told me, look what it did for him
The truth hurts so bad, wouldn’t you say?
So why tell it?
If ignorance is bliss, then I’m in
Heaven now
-Queens of the Stone Age, “3s and 7s”
I saw a post recently on Facebook saying that there was one consequence of the last Writer’s Guild strike that hasn’t been considered. NBC’s The Apprentice was losing ratings and they were going to drop Donald Trump’s contract, but the sudden need for “unscripted” TV meant they had to go back to him as the star of a new show, which was how we got Celebrity Apprentice, which was how Trump managed to get back into the public profile, also the same time he started pushing “birther” conspiracy theories about President Obama, which got a lot more credibility because TV producers who knew better pushed Donald Trump as though he were actually an expert source on finance, or on anything.
It is not newsworthy, or a surprise, that given a microphone and a stacked audience Trump will act like an orangoutan with Tourette’s Syndrome that fell fifty feet, landed on his head and is still able to talk, but what is surprising and newsworthy is that CNN, after everything we have learned about Trump in seven years, gave him a free platform AGAIN. Which raises the question of which entity is more stupid and desperate for attention.
Seriously: FUCK CNN. I blame these whores for the Trump presidency more than Russia, more than Hillary Clinton’s incompetence, more than James Comey and even more than Fox News. You would expect Russia and Fox to shill for a wannabe fascist. It took CNN to make him respectable. It took CNN to tell Middle America, “Hey, this is a REAL candidate. This is a centrist candidate. This is a serious alternative to Hillary Clinton, not like these minor party candidates that we’re NOT giving free air time.”
You could make the case that in 2015-2016, the people at CNN who knew Trump as a New York gadabout still liked him and didn’t know what he was really going to turn into, but they can’t say that now. Not after the Russky traitor bitch deliberately tried to destroy America’s (small r) republican system of government and showed he was willing to kill his own vice president to do it by crowdsurfing a mob of Confederate sympathizers. You can cover him, yes, because it’s the Republican Party that made the decision to keep him and that is a newsworthy (if repugnant) decision in itself, but that does not obligate you to enable him, as you (CNN and other media) did in the past. Keep in mind, this is a guy who used his presidential administration to help Saudi Arabia cover up and minimize the butcher death of Jamal Khashoggi (a Saudi-Turkish journalist working with the Washington Post) because he’d exposed critical truths about their government. This is a guy who routinely “jokes” about the violence he’d like to inflict on the press. And yet, CNN, like the Republican Party, comes crawling back to a man whom they know would have them killed just because it serves his purposes, or simply out of amusement.
What should we call them now?
Conservative News Network?
Call it Not News?
Cucking for Neo Nazis?
I mean really, it raises the question of why Trump needs to rape women when CNN will blow him and then bend over for free.
The thing is that whatever one might think of “conservatism”, it is clearly animating the Supreme Court, and several state governments, and requires some kind of philosophy. But that philosophy apparently doesn’t sell itself. You have Republicans in Congress like Nancy Mace and Dan Crenshaw who might be just as hardcore Christianist as the rest of them, but they still have enough brain cells to realize there’s a world outside their self-cultivated perceptions, and they need to negotiate with it, like everybody else does. But those aren’t the people running the Republican Party, let alone the Susan Collins-Mitt Romney types who clearly grew up in a different era. What’s running the Republican Party? The kind of goombas who wanted to watch what happened Wednesday on CNN, which is exactly why CNN presented it. You have an entire political party in this “two” party system that doesn’t believe in politics, it believes in “reality TV”, two words that do not belong in the same solar system, let alone the same phrase. They don’t want a government that works for anyone else, they don’t even want a government that works for them, they just want a circus. They just want Big Chief Ook-Ook Gorilla to dunk barrels on the mean old liberals and pound his chest and yell, so they can cheer along with all the other chimps in the audience. What they want, clearly what they’ve always wanted, is to turn the government of the most powerful country in the world into The Apprentice. And as long as they’re the ones who say how the Republican Party moves, anybody else who’s running for the Republican nomination is just another contestant on The Apprentice and Trump is still the host. And the grand prize for the winner is the chance to be Trump’s running mate in 2024, which as we know means being the designated patsy for Trump’s mob of mouth-breathers to kill when he needs someone to blame for his own incompetence.
But given the position that CNN has taken, it is clearly not trying to present “objective journalism” in giving Trumpism “equal time,” it’s deliberately appealing to that dysfunctional mindset, and that in itself is not an accident. Which raises the question as to what a concerned public is to do about all this.
Because clearly Chris Licht and the other suits at CNN think they can appeal to a Trump-friendly audience in the wake of Fox News settling its defamation lawsuit and then firing star anchor Tucker Carlson. But that debacle shows us how to combat this media misinformation campaign, given how the Fox case and the fall of Carlson was the main media story prior to CNN allowing Mr. Attention Hound to stink up the TV screen again.
The idea that one can shift the “Clinton News Network” rightward on the premise that that will make it more centrist is a bit disingenuous in this day and age. CNN was the only cable news network that still had pretenses to journalistic objectivity or objectivity on the part of its anchors. At both Fox and MSNBC hosts are expected to wear their politics on their sleeve. And that in itself has not killed journalism. Modern people find it more credible that a journalist would have an opinion than not. And one can have an opinion that Donald Trump did good things for this country, did good things for the economy, gave you the Supreme Court Justices you wanted, and all that. That’s no sin. Those are opinions. In some cases, they might even be backed up by fact. But you can’t say you’re violating journalism or committing fraud just for having an opinion. You ARE committing fraud if you present information that is opposite to what you know to be true, and you present that misinformation as real news.
CNN might not be deliberately presenting the opposite of truth as fact – yet – but it’s a small distinction when you allow Trump a whole hour to present his anti-truth with just Kaitlin Collins going “that’s not true” over and over again while she gets laughed down by his fan club of hooting redcaps. That was the technical concession that made the event “journalism” rather than a Trump campaign event. But as with the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit on Fox, there’s a pretty obvious effort to slant coverage, not on the basis of what is known to be fact, but to appeal to or retain a certain viewer demographic.
The difference with Fox is that we not only have a difference of opinion (as in, ‘should a man who plotted violent insurrection against an election certification even BE treated as a legitimate candidate, let alone given a friendly platform’) but direct evidence, obtained largely through the plaintiff’s discovery process, that Fox knew the votes weren’t there to save Trump’s re-election in 2020, but presented the false narrative that Dominion in particular had skewed their voting machines to take votes from him. In the process they also discovered certain embarrassing things about the company’s internal politics, such as, Tucker Carlson and other people at Fox actually hated and feared Trump but pushed the Dominion lie because they could see that telling the truth about Trump would alienate their “core audience“. Notably, as the Dominion case reached summary judgment, the presiding judge told Fox that if the case went to trial, Fox (the defendant) would not be allowed to make the argument that their coverage had news value, saying “I would have to tell the jury that newsworthiness is not a defense to defamation.”
Remember what Michelle Wolf said: “You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks, or vodka, or water, or college, or ties, or Eric… but he has helped YOU. He has helped you sell your papers, and your books, and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. “
Fox News, in particular, was so obsessed with catering to the Trump fan club that they crossed the line from simply advocating for a controversial position to presenting the opposite of fact as news. And when you do that, and do so at the expense of a party that is in position to sue you, you can get taken to court and you CAN lose. As Trump has also learned. Just because you have a right to say something doesn’t mean other people don’t have the right to call you on falsehood, and you can’t call it “news” when it’s really defamation.
Because if there was a bright side to CNN’s desperate appeal to the Trump audience, it’s that the most newsworthy aspect of the Wednesday town hall was Trump continuing to dig holes for himself. He told Collins that he had a right to threaten Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger: “I said ‘you owe me votes’ because the election was rigged,” said Trump, speaking to moderator Kaitlan Collins. “That election was rigged, and if this call was bad, why didn’t [Raffensperger] and his lawyers hang up?” An Atlanta newspaper quoted: “My initial thoughts were, this isn’t going to help,” said Caren Myers Morrison, a law professor at Georgia State University and a former prosecutor. “I think it’s some good corroborating evidence.” When Collins asked him if he’d shown the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago to anyone else after leaving the White House, he said “Not really.” When she asked him to clarify, he just said “Not that I can think of.” And just the day after he got found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case, Trump joshed about it to the CNN audience, using his go-to insult of “whack job” and insulting both her and her husband, to such an extent that Carroll’s lawyer told the New York Times they have cause to consider another lawsuit – one in which CNN might be held liable because they knew (or could easily guess) what Trump would say in advance.
See, this is why the Candyass Caligula spent most of that trial at his European golf properties even after the judge gave him the opportunity to testify in his own defense even after his defense rested. Because they couldn’t really offer a defense when Trump’s conduct is public record, and while he can tell any lie he wants outside a court, he knows he’s legally liable for what he says in deposition – and when he did make one it helped the case against him. If he lies in public OR tells the truth in court it makes things worse for him, because that’s what happens when you compulsively commit crimes. And it’s one thing to be liable in civil cases, but when your big mouth implicates you in plans to cancel an election that would remove you from power, that’s likely to lead to prison time.
Assuming, of course, that someone in Washington, New York or Atlanta cares to prosecute.