The Children's News Network

I was on business in Atlanta sometime in the mid-1980s and had a free afternoon. I decided I'd take a tour of the then new network headquarters of CNN—the first cable news network and the go-to 24-hour source for domestic and international news. At the time, CNN had become an important and exceptionally popular news source, challenging the dominance of 30-minute broadcast network news. I recall that I bought a blue hat with the red CNN logo and wore it proudly during a cold winter in the northeast.

The hat is long gone, and so is CNN's reputation as a reliable news source. American's first cable news network has become a pathetic caricature of media bias—inaccurate, strident, hyperpartisan, populated by a lightweight crew of talking heads that has little grasp of the issues and less intelligence overall. It is often unwatchable.

Julie Kelly comments:

... it must really hurt the tender feelings of the puerile talent pool at CNN that the Investigation, Discovery, and Hallmark channels have more viewers than they do. They must really want to pout and kick their little sister over the fact that Fox News had more than double the number of viewers than they did in 2017, and their right-wing rival has been the most watched cable news network for 194 months in a row. To make matters worse, the biggest bully in school, Donald Trump, keeps giving them social-media wedgies on Twitter every week. Even when they try to fight back by explaining how an apple is really a banana or something, everyone makes fun of them.

The CNN roster of reporters and anchors is loaded with some of the most immature whiners in television news. The network’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, is Arnold Horshack to Sarah Sanders’ Mr. Kotter, the annoying (but not nearly as loveable) class dunce trying to get attention from his eye-rolling teacher. On Monday, Acosta tussled with Sanders about whether Trump would have run into Stoneman Douglas High School to “save the day” during the February 14 shooting and worried that schools will become like “the Wild West.” Alisyn Camerota pouted that NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch was using explosive rhetoric against the media: “How dare you?” she wailed.

CNN is everything that's wrong with the main stream media. Not only has it become a blatant advocate for one political party and leftist ideology; not only has it repeated served up fake news precipitated by its own need to promote a single narrative; not only has it ignored major scandals and downplayed any important facts, events, or information that conflicts with its world view; not only does it shout down opposing voices that are foolish enough to appear on the network—CNN is bad television and very bad news, and its ratings demonstrate that fact. Minor cable channels (e.g., Discovery, Hallmark) have more viewers than CNN does.

Kelly characterizes CNN as the "children's news network." That's an insult to any thinking child.