CNN has been struggling for a while now. CEO Chris Licht has been trying to bring the channel back to being an objective news network, but it hasn’t been that in a long time. He’s canned a bunch of people and ran the Trump Town Hall thinking that might pull Republican viewers back, but it only alienated their Trump-hating employees and audience. Now he’s allegedly under the gun himself, with sources saying he’s said he is “no longer overseeing business operations for the network.”
In truth, unless he had fired a lot more people and truly remade the network, he wasn’t going to have a chance of turning it around. Maybe not even then, since they’ve so alienated people for so long. But unfortunately for them, they still have folks like Kirsten Powers who seem to be cool with pushing the censorship of Republicans if they are saying “false” things. When you have people in media advocating for censorship, it’s not a particularly good look if you’re claiming you want to be objective.
But if they were trying to convince people of their objectivity, they managed to shoot themselves in the foot with another take of the BLM/Antifa 2020 riots after the death of George Floyd. CNN posted a video flashback from Minneapolis on May 30, 2020, with the caption, “When history is being made, we hit record. Unflinching, unrelenting, uncut. This is CNN.”
As police clash with people, firing gas, with spraypainted “Viva la Revolucion” and what looks like “F*ck 12” (f**k the law/police) on the barricades, you can hear CNN correspondent Oscar Jimenez describing the action, “This is peaceful protesting. Trying to stick to the message.”
Jimenez urges his team to get out of there, and ends by saying, “We’re in a brisk jog right now.”
What message would that be here? Just a reminder of where we were by this point. Rioters had already torched and ripped up parts of the city by May 30. They’d burnt up the Third Precinct. In the encounter, you can see things weren’t “peaceful” at all as they were hit by a projectile and gas was deployed. Not only was CNN not “unflinching”; they had to run for their safety because there was so much “peace.”
Here was Jimenez yet again in August 2020 in what has become a meme picture at this point, with the “mostly peaceful” protest chyron showing as flames roar behind him and rioters destroy parts of Kenosha, Wisconsin after the shooting of Jacob Blake.
Our Brad Slager has a word for this: “teargas-lighting.”
The riots and violence then spread to other cities, causing billions of dollars in damage. Hundreds of police officers and civilians were injured, and many people including police captain David Dorn and 8-year-old Secoriea Turner were murdered.
Even as CNN claims they want to change, they pull this out of their archive to remind us that they still are horrible. But sorry guys, you can’t pull the wool over our eyes. We’ve seen this show before and it’s one of the reasons why you lost any credibility that you might have once had.