From an anti-trump, anti-Fox News site that holds no brief for Donald Trump, we get this analysis of the premier hate-Trump network. TD
National Review
"As a child, I was aware of CNN in part because its introductory bumper featured the sinister voice of Darth Vader, and in part because it was both the prototype and the stereotype of the 24-hour news channel. CNN showed up in movies, either as itself or in parodies that imitated its role. It was on in the airports and the hospitals and the hotel lobbies, and in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. When something bad or exciting was happening, you would tell your friends, “Turn on CNN.' ”
"CNN was careful and self-consciously nonpartisan — or, at least, it was keen for viewers to believe that it was. Its slogans were “This is CNN” — well, yes — and “The most trusted name in news,” and it cultivated its position within the firmament in much the same way as does Wikipedia today. It could be sensationalist and intrusive at times, but it was sensationalist and intrusive in the way that the paparazzo is rather than in the way that protesters who bang drums in your face and insist that you give up gasoline are. In short, it was what it said it was: a news network.
"It is no longer that. These days, CNN is a peculiar and unlovely hybrid of progressive propaganda outlet, oleaginous media apologist, sexless cultural scold, and frenzied Donald Trump stalkerblog. When news breaks, it is no longer useful or appropriate to tell someone, “Turn on CNN,” because if he did, he would be as likely to be presented with a wall of advocacy and obsession as with the headlines of the hour. Today, CNN does not broadcast the news; it broadcasts what it wants you to think the news is. At long last, it has become Fox.
. . .
" . . . Even more transparent a player than Acosta is Don Lemon, who is a “news anchor” in the same sense as that in which Nick Saban is a referee. In recent years, Lemon has become famous for refusing to accept when he is wrong — in 2014, having been informed that he did not know the difference between a semiautomatic and an automatic firearm, he tried to make the distinction a matter of personal taste with a desperately deployed “for me . . .” — and for his routine inability to control his emotions during interviews. The best — well, the worst — illustration of the latter tendency came in August of 2019, when Lemon invited the Reverend Bill Owens onto his show and then grew angry as Owens, an African-American pastor who had just met with President Trump to work on improving conditions in inner cities and wanted to talk about that rather than about Trump’s ridiculous tweeting, repeatedly refused to call the president a racist. When it became abundantly clear that Owens was not going to take the bait, Lemon instantly and dramatically switched tack, accusing Owens of homophobia, questioning whether he was sufficiently “Christianly or godly,” and implying that Owens was “condoning” Trump’s attacks on figures such as Representative Elijah Cummings. As Lemon did this, the technical team at CNN changed the chyron at the bottom of the screen so that it ceased to describe Owens as an “African American faith leader” and labeled him instead as a “controversial pastor.” From honored guest to enemy of progress in five minutes flat."
. . .
"Having displayed a weird Trump-campaign tweet that portrayed the president as the supervillain Thanos from the Avengers, Don Lemon sputtered and twitched and shook his head on his show last week, before saying, “I can’t even believe I’m even having to report this on the news.”
'But you know what, Don? You don’t have to report that. Nobody has to. There are many words that one might use to describe what Fox, MSNBC, and CNN are doing in the year 2019, some of them unprintable in this magazine. “News,” alas, is not among the first 50 that come to mind.
National Review
And Jim Acosta is no reporter
Watching CNN try to push an obvious political agenda while retaining sufficient space for plausible deniability is akin to watching a two-year-old child try to steal a much-coveted chocolate bar without getting caught by his parents; one can only shake one’s head and laugh at the incompetence."When ThinkProgress announced that it was going out of business, a few observers wondered aloud, “Why didn’t anybody buy it?” But why would they have, when we have CNN?
"As a child, I was aware of CNN in part because its introductory bumper featured the sinister voice of Darth Vader, and in part because it was both the prototype and the stereotype of the 24-hour news channel. CNN showed up in movies, either as itself or in parodies that imitated its role. It was on in the airports and the hospitals and the hotel lobbies, and in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. When something bad or exciting was happening, you would tell your friends, “Turn on CNN.' ”
"CNN was careful and self-consciously nonpartisan — or, at least, it was keen for viewers to believe that it was. Its slogans were “This is CNN” — well, yes — and “The most trusted name in news,” and it cultivated its position within the firmament in much the same way as does Wikipedia today. It could be sensationalist and intrusive at times, but it was sensationalist and intrusive in the way that the paparazzo is rather than in the way that protesters who bang drums in your face and insist that you give up gasoline are. In short, it was what it said it was: a news network.
"It is no longer that. These days, CNN is a peculiar and unlovely hybrid of progressive propaganda outlet, oleaginous media apologist, sexless cultural scold, and frenzied Donald Trump stalkerblog. When news breaks, it is no longer useful or appropriate to tell someone, “Turn on CNN,” because if he did, he would be as likely to be presented with a wall of advocacy and obsession as with the headlines of the hour. Today, CNN does not broadcast the news; it broadcasts what it wants you to think the news is. At long last, it has become Fox.
. . .
" . . . Even more transparent a player than Acosta is Don Lemon, who is a “news anchor” in the same sense as that in which Nick Saban is a referee. In recent years, Lemon has become famous for refusing to accept when he is wrong — in 2014, having been informed that he did not know the difference between a semiautomatic and an automatic firearm, he tried to make the distinction a matter of personal taste with a desperately deployed “for me . . .” — and for his routine inability to control his emotions during interviews. The best — well, the worst — illustration of the latter tendency came in August of 2019, when Lemon invited the Reverend Bill Owens onto his show and then grew angry as Owens, an African-American pastor who had just met with President Trump to work on improving conditions in inner cities and wanted to talk about that rather than about Trump’s ridiculous tweeting, repeatedly refused to call the president a racist. When it became abundantly clear that Owens was not going to take the bait, Lemon instantly and dramatically switched tack, accusing Owens of homophobia, questioning whether he was sufficiently “Christianly or godly,” and implying that Owens was “condoning” Trump’s attacks on figures such as Representative Elijah Cummings. As Lemon did this, the technical team at CNN changed the chyron at the bottom of the screen so that it ceased to describe Owens as an “African American faith leader” and labeled him instead as a “controversial pastor.” From honored guest to enemy of progress in five minutes flat."
. . .
"Having displayed a weird Trump-campaign tweet that portrayed the president as the supervillain Thanos from the Avengers, Don Lemon sputtered and twitched and shook his head on his show last week, before saying, “I can’t even believe I’m even having to report this on the news.”
'But you know what, Don? You don’t have to report that. Nobody has to. There are many words that one might use to describe what Fox, MSNBC, and CNN are doing in the year 2019, some of them unprintable in this magazine. “News,” alas, is not among the first 50 that come to mind.
