Two columns by Quin. (Links to full columns embedded in the headlines.)
CNN doesn’t even know what a ‘fact’ is anymore (Aug. 19). An exchange on CNN this afternoon shows that the collapse of fact-based journalistic integrity continues its sad progression.
Even as the public tells researchers, rather passionately, that it detests the establishment media’s refusal to draw adequate, old-style distinctions between fact and opinion, the media continue to obliterate those lines. All day, every day, the evidence rushes in, so this particular example, at about 2:30 EDT, the above-noted date and time, is far more the rule than the exception. Still, it is instructive.
The segment was CNN Newsroom, hosted by Anderson Cooper. It’s one of the network’s supposedly straight-news shows. The interviewee was another CNN headliner, Don Lemon, listed on the screen chyron as a “CNN anchor” and generally treated by the network as an objective voice, believe it or not.
Yet, with Cooper nodding his head in apparently entire agreement, with not a hint of attempt by either anchor to keep things objective, Lemon let loose with the statement that President Trump “is a bigot, he’s a racist, he’s a hypocrite. That’s a fact.”
Read that again: “That’s a fact.”
How, pray tell, is that a “fact” — rather than an opinion?
(I happen to agree with it. That still doesn’t make it a fact.)….
CNN’s Don Lemon
Media’s Kamala cover-up shows why people hate the press (Aug. 17). The ludicrous establishment-media narrative portraying vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a “pragmatic moderate” or a “centrist” is a perfect example of the media’s abandonment of standards and integrity.
Even if political labels are somewhat subjective, there exist objective ways for “straight news” outlets to determine which labels to use, if they use such labels at all. Under none of those objective standards could Harris be ranked among anything other than the liberal edge of American elective politics.
This is important as much for what it says about the establishment media as for what it says about Harris. One major reason President Trump taps into the anger of so many “ordinary Americans,” including with his attacks on the media as the “enemy of the people,” is that the media have completely and rightly lost the public’s trust through their abandonment of objectivity in favor of leftist cheerleading. People resent it when they know they are being manipulated…..
