The legacy media is dying a slow death. Big media corporations like CNN no longer have the monopoly they once did and are feeling the pressure. In their desperate throes to remain relevant they are becoming increasingly unhinged.
The latest nastiness from CNN is what finally provoked me to speak up.
Last week Donald Trump posted a silly video on his Twitter account. The video, featuring Trump wrestling with the CNN logo superimposed over his opponent’s face, drew this response from the network:
Leaving aside the fact they are reporting on a silly video—when there’s many more important things they could be doing—the idea that the video “encourages violence against reporters” is completely ridiculous. Either they are stupid (and don’t understand metaphor) or they think we are. And, besides that, the video is not aimed at reporters, it features a corporate logo—CNN is a corporation, not a person!
But that isn’t the nasty part. What finally made convinced me to write was how they hunted down the person who originally posted the video and threatened to reveal his personal information:
Excuse me? You threaten to dox some anonymous Redditer—rumored to be a fifteen year old boy—and then have the audacity to lecture about “ugly behavior on social media” for his posting a silly video about your corporation?
Those sanctimonious clowns. CNN has no moral authority to speak about things like dignity or juvenile behavior. They just blackmailed some poor sclub, a private citizen, because he dared to put their corporate logo on a wrestling video—talk about some thin-skinned bullies!
No matter how much you hate Trump and want to take him down, this is not the way to do it. In fact, this kind of hypocritical behavior from media elites is exactly what fed his rise. Sure, they might hide their nastiness in more sophisticated language and use more subtle means, but it is what it is. It is just as classless and wrong when they do it.
I still disapprove of Trump, my concerns about him remain the same now as they did before when I blogged about it, and nothing about his Presidency has been a surprise. But what is truly surprising is what he exposed in his critics. There is beginning to be less and less contrast between them and him—which is not good for those who want Trump gone.
CNN has a credibility problem, they were recently forced to retract a false story about Russian collusion with a Trump associate, and now this. Instead of rising about the man they despise, they are actually doing the same things he does and with more indifference towards those they trample over. That’s probably why more and more people are tuning out and going elsewhere for their news.
It is one thing to call out politicians, public figures and corporations—that is fair game. It is quite another thing to use a corporate machine to intimate a person like me or you for posting something online. It is petty, ruthless and risks making Trump look classy by comparison.
