Eulogy for CNN
People following me on Twitter already know this, but now I’m going to put in print and permalink:
CNN is dead to me.
I turned off their breaking news texts, unsubscribed from their blogs, removed their page from my Blackberry.
They are dead, because last night they walked over a couple of lines that are, in my opinion, completely unacceptable.
Here is part of a transcript from an exchange between Paul Begala and Donna Brasile while they were waiting for election returns last night:
BEGALA: We cannot win with egg heads.
Let me finish my point.
We cannot win with egg heads and African-Americans. OK, that is the
Dukakis Coalition, which carried ten states and gave us four years of
the first George Bush.
To her credit, Donna Brasile served it right back up to him, but it wasn’t just the words that offended. It was the message. Instead of placing the blame at the feet of those who refused to support the Democratic party when it most needed it, it was placed at the feet of those who DID support the party.
Discourse like this makes the division deeper, and does nothing to advance a conversation about why Hispanics, women and non-educated whites chose to vote for George Bush.
I might have forgiven that, since Donna Brasile did such a magnificent job of pushing Paul Begala back into a corner, but what John King and Wolf Blitzer did to the mayor of Gary, Indiana later that night is absolutely evil, unforgivable, and deserving of a humble apology they’re never going to get.
Lake County was slow to report returns, as was another rural county that went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. When they did report returns, they started with the absentee ballots, which broke 75/25 for Barack Obama and erased much of Clinton’s lead in Indiana. The balance of the reporting came in slowly and piecemeal.
John King and Wolf Blitzer went after Rudy Clay with a vengeance, interrogating him over and over about why it took so long for the ballots to be counted and the precincts to report. No matter how many times he answered the question, they would not accept the answer and continued to browbeat him, bringing in the Hammond mayor to act as surrogate and accuse Clay of stuffing the ballot box. Of course, the accusation took place on the air after Rudy Clay had hung up the phone.
It is unacceptable for a major news outlet to allow such an accusation to be made with absolutely no substantive evidence that there had been ANY vote-tampering or other impropriety, AND to bring in an Ivy-League looking white mayor to level that accusation.
There’s no other word for it. It was race-baiting. Intentional race-baiting. The clear message was that you sure couldn’t trust the black guy to count the votes, but the white guy on the screen, yeah, he was trustworthy. And this is done in the context of a very close and deeply divided primary season between a black man and a white woman. A white woman, incidentally, with extraordinarily high name recognition and a former President of the United States at her back.
When CNN began to see their ratings climb as a result of their election coverage, they slowly became more sensational and less factual. Not that they were ever as factual or as in-depth as they could have been, but as time went on, I have watched them move closer and closer to being the Democratic party equivalent of Fox News to Republicans. Biased, and in this case, dirty racists.
So farewell to you, Anderson Cooper, as much as I love watching you in a hurricane, I accept that there will be no more long nights with the wind and rain bearing down on you.
To Donna Brasile and David Gergen, thanks for offering the only intellectually honest commentary.
To CNN, you are dead and buried. Only a sincere, heartfelt apology to every egghead and African-American you insulted and accused could possibly resurrect you, and since I don’t see that coming any time soon, I’m shoveling the dirt on your coffin as fast as I can.
MSNBC is my new bff. Olbermann may not play as well in a hurricane, but the man can certainly make his own weather when he’s pissed.
Buh bye.
Update, courtesy of GW Frink: The Chicago Tribune tells the story of Lake County’s delay. They had three times the number of absentee ballots as ever before, and 144,291 total voters. The final count showed no indication of ballot-tampering; in fact, as ballots were counted, the gap between the two candidates was closed.
So CNN, where IS that apology?
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