Unlike political candidates, CNN is unconstrained by federal campaign laws. The network took this fact as a mandate during the 2016 campaign season to fight dirty in its efforts to promote its candidate.
CNN lost that battle, but now it is fighting a new war — this one for its very survival. Once again the network finds itself on the losing side. Its opponent, the president of the United States, is treating its reporters with the same contempt that his predecessor visited on Fox News Channel.
A number of them, most notably senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta, are fighting their own private battles using the president’s weapon of choice, social media.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
CNN’s senior media correspondent and host of a show ironically titled “Reliable Sources tried appealing to journalistic authority, tweeting out link to a musing on Facebook by a man he evidently considers a giant of the fourth estate. Here’s the essay-let, which offers the writer’s take on Donald Trump, Jr.’s emails and what they portend for the future of our great nation:
The questions are obvious. The answers are wanting. We the American people deserve to know what in God’s name is happening. Our legal system demands a presumption of innocence until the evidence proves otherwise. But the evidence is piling up.
I have been around a long time. I like to think I have seen a lot. But the revelations of the emails that set up the meeting between Donald Trump. [sic] Jr. — and let us not forget both Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner — with an agent of the Russian government is unlike anything I could even have imagined. There is still a lot that we do not know. But only a hypocrite, a cynic or a fool could argue that this development can be innocuously explained.
it is like a carnival mirror is being held up to American democracy, distorting everything we thought we knew into grotesque new shapes. We need a reality check. This is decision time, especially for our elected officials. Which side of history will you be on?
–> @DanRather asks: “Which side of history will you be on?” https://t.co/Q4HeGLsS7P
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 11, 2017
(h/t James Taranto)
