Just another reason to count down the days until Paramount, the company run by the Trump-friendly Ellison family, takes over CNN. That news has radical Democrats and Hollywood elites up in arms, but it should thrill the rest of us. Woke garbage like this will no longer be made. Anyway, back to Swisher and the new miniseries.
Swisher has her doubts about “biohacking,” and she seems equally uncertain about the future of the network airing her documentary. In an interview aired on C-SPAN, Swisher threatened to cut ties with CNN once the Trump-friendly Ellison family successfully acquires Warner Bros.-Discovery, the network’s parent company.
“I refuse to work for an organization that doesn’t respect journalists,” the Columbia School of Journalism product said. “And I don’t mean not cutting [jobs] … It’s a basic disdain for [journalism] as anything useful, that there’s not a way to reform it except for hiring someone who isn’t a journalist.”
Swisher seems to be alluding to Ellison’s acquisition of CBS News last year, but if so, her objection makes no sense. Bari Weiss, who Ellison installed as the new CBS editor-in-chief, held editorial positions atThe Wall Street JournalandThe New York Timesbefore striking out on her own to startThe Free Press. Swisher might disagree with Weiss’s anti-woke centrist worldview, but to suggest that she “isn’t a journalist” is absurd.
Liberal journalists have criticized some of Weiss’s editorial decisions, like refusing to air a one-sided segment about Trump’s deportations, or simply being even-handed and fair in reporting the news.
Their blinders have been killing the legacy media. CNN seems to have learned nothing from its biggest blunders, like the vilification of the Covington Catholic kids or the “fiery but mostly peaceful” chyron during the George Floyd riots.
Just last month, CNN host Abby Phillip rushed to apologize after falsely asserting that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was the target of an attempted anti-Muslim terrorist bombing.
Once again, CNN reported the exact opposite of the truth. Not only was Mamdani not the target, but the ISIS-supporting teens who carried out the attack literally yelled “Allahu Akbar” as they threw bombs at anti-Muslim protesters outside the mayor’s residence. In other words, it wasn’t an anti-Muslim attack; it was an anti-anti-Muslim attack.
The Mamdani, Minneapolis, and Covington screw-ups all had the same cause: a pervasive left-wing bias that makes CNN incapable of reporting facts objectively. The present CNN team approaches every story with a clear idea of who the good guys are (radical Muslims, BLM, identity-politics militants) and who the bad guys are (“islamophobes” and “racists”—the terms are so overused that CNN has helped reduce them to meaninglessness—plus the bad white kids in MAGA hats). An overwhelming accumulation of evidence can sometimes force CNN to reassess these conclusions, but nothing can ever dislodge the prejudices that produced them.
That’s why CNN is dying. Aside from a one-year interlude under reformist CEO Chris Licht, the network has spent most of the last decade content to manage decline in a way that leaves its self-righteous delusions intact.
Swisher knows the act can’t continue forever. CNN is unwell. Its declining viewership numbers prove it.
CNN was founded as an experimental news outlet, with 24-hour coverage to broaden public perspectives beyond the processed 20-minute-a-day news blast. Swisher is just unwilling to try an experimental treatment that might save the patient. CNN needs a cold plunge, a carnivore diet, red-light therapy, and whatever other oddball health and wellness hack might reverse its terminal decline. If Swisher finds the doctor prescribing this regimen too distasteful, she should make good on her promise to leave CNN and let real journalists and real journalism take her place.
