I bet you never thought you would see President Trump and Megyn Kelly in full agreement on anything, especially after what happened during the 2016 Republican Party primary.
But such is the uniting power of the broad disdain that people in this country have for CNN. It has even Trump and Kelly unified in the belief that the cable news network is a left-wing activist group.
Kelly appeared this weekend on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, where both she and the show’s host discussed media bias and the intersection of politics and journalism.
“There was a gun rally. It was peaceful. And you could see how disappointed the media was that the Civil War didn’t break out,” Maher said, referring to pro-Second Amendment demonstrations last week in Richmond, Virginia.
He is correct. Newsrooms have not been that disappointed in a nonviolent outcome since the release of Joker.
“Of course,” the former Fox News anchor responded.
“That’s what I think media bias is, much more than politics,” Maher continued.
Kelly said, “I think that there was a liberal slant in the media even before Trump got in there. Take CNN. He went in there and said CNN is completely biased to the Left, they’re lefties, they’re completely against him, and my take on it was, in the beginning, he was wrong, CNN wasn’t that way.”
“I used to watch CNN all the time when I was at Fox,” she added. “When I was getting ready for The Kelly File, I had on CNN, and I’d watch a lot of their shows. I like a lot of the anchors over there, but my view is CNN became the thing that Trump said they were, and they weren’t and now they are. Now they’re indistinguishable from MSNBC.”
She is right, and I say this as someone who used to draw a check from CNN.
CNN in the past three years has debased itself with its persistent and shameless attempts to “resist” the president. This goes for both its reporting and commentary departments. The network has produced some of the sloppiest journalism of the Trump era. It has produced also some truly, mesmerizingly stupid analysis. Yet, undeterred by its own absurdity and perhaps even ignorant of its partisan activism, CNN regularly proclaims itself a champion for truth and a martyr for the facts.
Where I disagree with Kelly is where she says CNN is indistinguishable from MSNBC. This is an insult to MSNBC. In many ways, CNN is actually worse off than its competitor, which at least has the guts to admit its left-wing activism. CNN does not have the moral conviction to do even that much. Instead, CNN operates behind the ever-thinning veneer of “journalism,” claiming it is merely trying to get at the truth.
Sure.
National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke wrote recently about CNN’s descent into political activism. It is as spot-on a commentary as you will find anywhere.
“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,” he writes.
Truer words ne’er have been spoken.
