I've written before about CNN's outright, undiluted fakery when it came to Trump's "very fine people" comment on the Charlottesville incident, deliberately (how could it not be?) ripped from its context in which he was referring to (supposed) non-white-supremacists who were there to protest the removal of statues. As far as I'm concerned, this and numerous other incidents lead me by cognitive necessity and sanity to discount, doubt or disbelieve things that I see asserted on a network such as CNN. CNN has made it rather abundantly clear - especially after Trump's becoming president - that in its political coverage it is in the business of advocacy and not reporting.
Here is perhaps the most obvious case in point to date:
Now, Trump's tweet about the "Squad" of leftist freshman (freshwoman?) Congresswomen contained plenty of inflammatory language but the language the left/Dems/"progressives" and their media allies seized upon to the exclusion of everything else, including Trump's original point about loving one's country, was his "go back to the countries they came from" language. Now, there's a case to be made that this "go back to where you came from" language is racist in content (whether it is in intention) but here's the thing: there's controversy here. Trump's point - I assume his own perspective is relevant here as to what his point was - is something about the "squad" not being sufficiently loving of America. This makes it a matter of controversy, interpretation and opinion whether it is appropriate to refer to the entirety of the tweet as racist.
If you don't see this as a matter of interpretation and opinion, then there's no point in my trying to reason with you further here. As a matter of indisputable fact, today's leftists/Dems and much of the rest of the country are not in agreement on what constitutes racism, racist speech, hate speech, and the like. This is precisely why the left's cult-like chants of "Trump's racism" are so ineffective and fall on so many deaf ears. The un-deaf-ears they fall on tend to react in terms of how idiotic and ill-supported the chants are. The whole process here feeds into a vicious escalating cycle: The left calls Trump (and a lot of other things/people) racist, that leads the opposition to be increasingly disgusted with the left, which increases the likelihood that the left will react with more charges of racism, and on it goes. Observers from outside of this vicious cycle might note just what a stupid and indeed vicious cycle this is, just more of the same "politics as usual" (except it really isn't; the political situation in the USA today can be likened to a Red/Blue Cold War, when this hasn't been the case in the past; I'll just refer you to many blog entries of mine under the "leftist losers" tag for which "side" I think is way more at fault for this phenomenon, and I've grown tired of commenting on all the new examples that illustrate my point, the essential trend having been overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly established in any honest and thoughtful reader's mind). (The only issue here is just how intellectually bankrupt the non-left is, compared to the left.)
Now, it's one thing for activists, pundits, and opposing politicians to call Trump a racist or to claim that he says racist things. That's all fair game in politics and their arguments and credibility should be assessed on their merits.
It's another thing for a purported news outlet to throw the term "racism/racist" around the way the activists/pundits/politicians. Given that it's pretty obvious that people in the country don't agree on what persons or statements merit being called racist, a news outlet should be extra-careful about how it respects and reflects such a difference of opinion/interpretation. The charge of racism is itself toxic enough that a news outlet needs to take cognizance of this.
CNN has determined that it's a matter of fact that Trump's tweet is racist.
How can the producers of CNN hold such an opinion honestly? And if they don't know well enough to know that such an opinion cannot be held honestly, that points to a different set of problems. I'm going on the assumption here that CNN's producers know better. They might try to rationalize their editorial decisions on the grounds that this is a matter of fact, that in the age of Trump matters of opinion need to be treated in some cases as matters of fact, that truth needs to be spoken to power, etc. But that's a piss-poor rationalization, because of the simple confusion of fact and opinion/interpretation.
Now - and it would sure be nice if this could go without saying, but these days the toxicity levels are too high - there are clear-cut cases of racism and they could be factually reported as such. But in the case of Trump there is simply too much there that's ambiguous and controversial. I (for one) am not convinced that Trump is a racist, much less that his anti-Squad tweet was racist. And no amount of cult-like "if you deny Trump is a racist that makes you a racist" argument from intimidation - basically an attempt to coerce agreement from a mind that hasn't been swayed by the arguments - is going to sway me from that.
CNN's dishonest editorializing-as-news seems premised on the notion advanced all over the place by leftists nowadays that there isn't controversy here, that it is a matter of established fact that Trump is a a racist, and that those who don't see it as they do are part of the (racism) problem. This mentality sounds more like that of a cult than of a group of people ready and willing to engage in a good-faith, mutual-understanding dialogue with those they disagree with. This cult-like mentality becomes more obviously nasty and destructive if it is adopted by a purported news organization. It not only destroys or diminishes their credibility on this subject, but on everything else (at least when it comes to political coverage).
It's not even so much an issue of what appears on CNN per se, but of the time slots in which the editorializing (masquerading as news) appears. It's one thing for Don Lemon in his opinion-show time slot to call Trump a racist. (At that time slot Lemon is opposite Laura Ingraham on Fox. I don't find myself devoting my valuable time to watching much of either show in that time slot.) At least Don Lemon's show, or shows during his time slot, are marked clearly enough as opinion programming. But it's another thing for "Trump's Racist Tweet" to appear in the CNN headline banner during The Lead with Jake Tapper, which represents itself as a harder news program. (Am I wrong?) And this is hardly one defining incident; it's just one that came up readily via the usual internet searching after seeing "racist tweet" all over CNN's headlines for days (so it wasn't hard to find a visual example with those very words).
Is it safe to say, then, that the credibility of CNN's political coverage is pretty much as shot as MSDNC's? I mean, I don't even bother with MSDNC here because their bias is so obvious and the intellectual quality of their punditry so low. But CNN still touts itself as "the most trusted name in news." (I don't think so. This isn't the previous generation's CNN.) And none of this is to excuse the problems one could readily point to on Fox News (or, what doesn't appear on Fox given its selection of topics and facts to cover/report, a selectivity exercised by the other two as well).
Given all this, it strikes me as reasonable to say that when CNN has a banner saying or implying Trump is a racist, it is engaging in the very sort of Fake News of which the president speaks. If there's one thing that Trump speaks about with credibility, it's how dishonest and biased the media coverage is. But the reason Trump speaks about this with credibility, when he speaks about so many other things without so much credibility, is that this is pretty much a no-brainer that anyone can see (anyone, that is, whose cognitive and critical faculties aren't destroyed in a cult-like fashion). So when a regular CNN-viewer manages selectively to notice all the examples of bias on Fox but then doesn't see the problem with CNN, we're not talking about an honest opposition to Trump here; it's bias and fake news/narrative combined toxically with hubris. But one naturally expects better from the CNN producers than from the rank-and-file CNN viewers; so what's the CNN producers' excuse?
