[July 29]
What is wrong with CNN these days? Has it lost all standards distinguishing news from opinion?
There are plenty of us who decry President Trump’s frequent descent into name-calling. Some of us even think it’s obvious he is a virulent bigot. We may even think that racial animus or racial provocation underlay Trump’s nasty weekend tweets about the city of Baltimore.
But those are opinions. They are not irrefutable. They are not hard news.
Yet I am watching CNN right now as it runs a chyron on the bottom of the screen labeled “Politics of hate.” Its subhead is “Trump using racism as a political strategy in new rhetoric.”
The chyrons do not contain question marks. They do not say that some people say these things about Trump. The chyrons state these judgments as fact. They state them as incontrovertible. They brook no disagreement. They make a bald assertion, unmoored to either objectivity or dispassionate reporting.
This is not fact-based news. This is not straight reporting. This is bias, pure and simple. … [The full blog post is at this link.]
