What Pathetic Losers There Are at CNN! - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
What Pathetic Losers There Are at CNN!
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The comparison between an NFL locker room and the newsroom at a cable news channel might not seem particularly appropriate, but for our purposes here, it’ll suffice.

Because what we know about CNN is those guys are just like the Lions, Jets, or Giants.

Maybe even worse. With what’s coming out at CNN in the wake of Jeff Zucker’s ouster there, this looks like a 1-16 team that traded away the top pick in the draft for a wide receiver without thumbs. What a joke of an organization Ted Turner’s pride and joy has turned into!

You already know about CNN having lost some nine-tenths of its audience in the past year. You know about the circus that was Chris Cuomo’s denouement, when, with all the surprise that there might be gambling at the casino, it was suddenly discovered he was working as a crisis consultant for his brother the governor of New York on CNN’s time.

You probably know about Don Lemon’s history of gay sexual assault, an incident related to which has Lemon headed to court, per a judge’s order which was released Tuesday:

The suit against Lemon was filed in 2019 by Dustin Hice, a bartender who alleges the anchor “put his hand down the front of his own shorts, and vigorously rubbed his genitalia, removed his hand and shoved his index and middle fingers into [Hice’s] mustache,” also according to Radar.

Lemon then allegedly asked Hice a lewd question about his sexual preference.

Lemon has denies the allegations and has accused Hice of attempting to extort him in the past, and has recently accused the plaintiff of destroying evidence in the case.

Lemon also had objected to a jury trial and instead wants a bench trial, which allows both sides to argue before a judge who would make the final decision in the case.

The judge in his ruling said Lemon will not suffer any harm and has “sufficient time to prepare for trial.”

You know about CNN’s unusual penchant for hiring producers who turn out to have problems with pedophilia. Twice in one year is, well, a lot:

Rick Saleeby, Jake Tapper’s former producer at CNN, has resigned and is now under investigation by law enforcement after text messages of his were made public by Project Veritas. The texts showed him soliciting photos of underaged girls and describing in graphic detail what he wanted to do sexually with his fiancee’s teen daughter….

The investigation into Saleeby comes right on the heels of the arrest of another CNN producer, John Griffin, who was Chris Cuomo’s senior producer. Griffin was arrested and charged with trafficking a minor after he allegedly flew a mother and her 9-year-old daughter across state lines in order to rape the child. Griffin, like Saleeby, fantasized about “mother-daughter” sex.

And you surely know about the almost comic firing of Zucker, the “player’s coach” of this 1-16 team who was keeping a side piece on the company payroll and ultimately tripped and fell on the sword when Cuomo, in the middle of negotiations to secure all or part of an $18 million contract buyout following his own firing, dropped dime on his old boss.

And this team full of rejects is going through this losing streak just as an ownership change looms. AT&T unloaded CNN to WarnerMedia Discovery last year, and the management change is coming. The new owners are, in football parlance, considering new schemes on both offense and defense — and many of the players are definitely not going to fit:

There’s a place for CNN in the proposed $43 billion combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery, billionaire media mogul John Malone told CNBC in a recorded interview that aired Thursday.

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” said the cable TV pioneer and longtime chairman of Liberty Media, which is a major shareholder in Discovery. “I do believe good journalism could have a role in this future portfolio that Discovery-TimeWarner’s going to represent.”

John Malone is not a particular proponent of CNN’s current brand of 24/7 left-wing propaganda palatable only to members of the ruling elite. He’s a habitual donor to Republican causes and candidates, though not in the amounts one might expect from a man of his wealth. That might be an indication John Malone is frugal and doesn’t like people who waste money.

Which means John Malone can be assumed to like almost nothing about CNN as it currently is. Who can blame him? It’s a 1-16 team with a roster full of oddballs and losers. When somebody can produce a compilation like this about you, you are not winning:

Organizations this corrupted, this discredited and this degenerate take on the smell of a loser, and you can easily perceive it in the attitudes and behaviors of the people in them — and not just the obvious bad apples (with which CNN is remarkably well-stocked).

This became supremely obvious Tuesday, when a fascinating piece came out about the CNN newsroom’s reaction to Zucker’s heave-ho:

Five days after Jeff Zucker’s dramatic and still-stunning ouster from CNN, network insiders remain vexed by WarnerMedia C.E.O. Jason Kilar’s refusal to elaborate about the circumstances that led to their former leader’s resignation. On Monday morning, Kilar held yet another Q&A session with CNN’s top producers and on-air talent in New York—this time over video conference, from his office in California, not in person, mercifully. But it went just as poorly as his in-person meetings had last week in New York, Washington, and Atlanta.

The hour-long meeting, a recording of which I obtained from a source, once again highlighted the profound sense of loyalty that CNN’s on-air talent have expressed toward Zucker and the overwhelming sense of grief that they feel in his absence, especially as they head toward the impending WarnerMedia-Discovery merger. Many spoke in grave terms, emphasizing their own grieving process, and in heavy-handed metaphors. “I think that what you’re hearing, and what we’re all experiencing, is just a huge shockwave to all of our mental health,” Alisyn Camerota, the CNN host, said during one of the most poignant moments of the meeting. “This has been incredibly destabilizing and unsettling. One of the secrets to mental health is understanding, and the way that happens is getting some answers and some closure. And we don’t have that. We don’t understand why the death penalty was necessary.”

OMG, Alisyn! Totes whining!

What’s destabilizing and unsettling to the shareholders is that you and your boss managed to set 90 percent of CNN’s audience on fire. Did you not think there would eventually be consequences to that when AT&T put this dog with fleas on the block?

Kilar probably felt he had to be diplomatic, though there’s zero reason why he should. Yes, CNN would need to stay on the air, for now, and so a fire-everybody-style turnover might not be possible.

But Alisyn Camerota’s mental health is really not the issue. The issue is CNN’s performance. And the gripers in that newsroom demanding verbal assurances and group hugs from their new boss will almost all be gone in a few months as this loser of a team is dismantled and its on-air “talent” — if you’ll permit the irony of such a misnomer — scattered to local TV news stations across the fruited plain.

Bad teams are easy to spot. In sports, and football in particular, they’re easy to spot because coaches and players get sent packing quickly as management searches desperately for assets worth holding on to.

AT&T didn’t have that mentality. AT&T was happy to keep together one of the losingest teams in television as it was regularly getting trounced by Murder, She Wrote reruns on the Hallmark Channel.

And Spongebob.

Malone and his guys aren’t likely to stand it for long. And Alisyn’s therapy sessions will probably have to be covered by the health plan at Channel 8 in Grand Junction by next year.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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