In the Age of Reason, Thomas Paine wrote:
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
CNN, like many other news networks, has profited immeasurably from accusatory news segments about President Trump’s supposed infidelities. Reporters and commentators at CNN turn into media watchdogs at the slightest hint of lurid behavior by President Trump, whether it’s true or not.
Most recently, CNN enjoyed the bump in ratings from a recent interview with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who claims to have had an affair with President Trump.
If you turned CNN on right now, odds are you’ll see Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who alleges she had an affair with President Trump in 2006. When a 2005 recording of Trump’s locker-room talk emerged, CNN, like most media outlets, went into activist mode.
Yet, the network’s recent advertisements for their original show, “American Dynasties: The Kennedys,” glorified President John F. Kennedy’s rampant womanizing, or, in their words, his “legendary love life,” adding, “Did one of his affairs connect him with the mob?”
“Legendary love life.”
As Ben Shapiro wrote in an article yesterday, “was JFK’s love life really legendary? In actuality, JFK was an awful person in the bedroom who certainly would have been labeled a sexual predator in this #MeToo moment.”
CNN’s focus is not on news.
DePauw University professor Jeffrey McCall penned an op-ed for the Hill about the cognitive dissonance at play:
CNN’s warped obsession with reporting about supposed adultery demonstrates a larger problem at the once-proud and groundbreaking channel. CNN’s focus is not on news, but on distracting itself and the nation’s news consumers with peripheral and sensation gibberish that fails to enhance the national dialogue. In the run-up and aftermath to the recently passed government spending bill, CNN mentioned McDougal and Daniels more than three times as often as the spending bill. The spending bill, of course, isn’t photogenic, but it impacts citizens way more than a playmate model.
The network’s coverage of President Trump is so prolific that they’ve neglected much of the news that matters, and undersold it. In other words, they’ve neglected truth in order to prove their own narrative. This is far worse than cognitive dissonance. It’s full-fledged hypocrisy.
And, as playwright Tennessee Williams famously wrote, “the only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!”
