Is there anything worse than a press so corrupted by its ties to Democrats it can't even recognize its own slobbering servility?
That's the picture with CNN, which, in response to White House orders to 'fetch' for it on impeachment, went and fetched and then told everyone about how they fetched.
According to Athena Thorne at PJMedia:
A CNN headline that read, “White House to send letter to news execs urging outlets to ‘ramp up’ scrutiny of GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry ‘based on lies’” surprised me this morning. I was ready to grudgingly give the left-wing rag some credit for speaking truth to power for once. But a quick read through the article shattered my dreams of CNN actually committing an act of journalism.
The gist of the story is that, on Tuesday, CNN obtained an advance draft of a media directive from the White House that it would have received on Wednesday anyway. The newsworthy part is that the directive is absolutely shocking for a White House to send to the allegedly free media. And the first two paragraphs of the CNN piece almost read like a real news item (emphasis is added throughout all quotes):
The White House plans to send a letter to top US news executives on Wednesday, urging them to intensify their scrutiny of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, despite having found no evidence of a crime. [Okay, so they slipped up and plunked a biased lie right in the first sentence.]
“It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies [oops! Another talking point slipped in],” Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote in the letter, according to a draft copy obtained by CNN.
The letter, which said an impeachment inquiry with no supporting evidence should “set off alarm bells for news organizations,” was sent to executives helming the nation’s largest news organizations, including CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, the Associated Press, CBS News, and others, a White House official familiar with the matter said.
Ramp up? Really? And sure enough, some of them ramped up, starting with CNN (emphasis added):
The correspondence comes one day after McCarthy announced that he had directed three House committees to begin an impeachment inquiry into Biden. House Republicans, most of whom have denied that disgraced former President Donald Trump committed any wrongdoing, have long sought to baselessly portray Biden as a corrupt, crime-ridden politician engaged in sinister activities.
Memo recipients Associated Press and ABC News did, too, going big on the "without evidence" and "baseless" modifiers to dismiss and belittle the House impeachment inquiry.
But at least they didn't announce their orders to go fetch the way CNN did.
That, according to legal scholar Jonathan Turley, sounds a lot like "marching orders."
Which they all should be embarrassed about taking, or if they were newsmen of any seriousness, defy and refuse to go along with.
But they did what they were told, courtesy of the directives from the White House counsel, Ian Sams, which Turley, as an attorney, finds particularly problematic. The White House counsel is just another political operative, he argues.
But operatives are one thing, lickspittle lackeys are another. The press loves to boldly claim that it's independent and non-partisan, reporting without fear or favor. In reality, they act as flying monkeys for Team Biden, flying through the air with their talking points on command.
Yet all of them except for CNN don't admit it. CNN is particularly servile. That's a repugnant place for any news organization to ever be, having so little self-respect they not only report White House talking points as news, but tell us all about how they took those White House talking points.
Blech, indeed.
Image: Gary Todd via Flickr // public domain