CNN, where reporting gives way to feelings
Just one week after arriving at CNN after her stint at MSNBC, “analyst” Kasie Hunt came out with an unbelievably bad take when California Governor Gavin Newsom won his recall election in a landslide on Tuesday night:
CA GOV BIG PICTURE: One of the top Democrats in the country got caught living like an elite while everyone else suffered. Elites vs. the rest is the driving force in our politics right now and Democrats have a tough needle to thread both in California & nationwide … (1/)
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 15, 2021
Hunt followed that up with:
Obviously California is a Special Place — but the fact that a Democratic national star in waiting *faced* a recall and then had to fight hard for it midway through the campaign does say a lot about the potential challenges Democrats face across the map (4/)
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 15, 2021
And then, even though President Joe Biden had flown to California to help Newsom win impressively, Hunt couldn’t resist attacking Biden:
…especially if President Biden can't demonstrate he's capable of getting the resurgent pandemic under control, has another competence crisis a la Afghanistan, can't get his budget plan through Congress, etc. (fin)
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 15, 2021
Leave it to the folks on Twitter, however, to set things straight. Here are a few of the many choice tweets that, to put it nicely, might make Kasie Hunt think twice about prioritizing “garbage takes” over solid reporting in the future:
Kasie Hunt is a glaring example of pundits who find doom in every Democratic victory.
— Stephanie. (@qsteph) September 15, 2021
Larry Elder: I lost on California recall election night.
Kasie Hunt: Hold my beer.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) September 15, 2021
https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1437997201683357699
Why are journalists like Kasie Hunt attempting to pick winners & losers in politics? This is how we got Trump. Why can't journalists just report the news instead of giving garbage takes?
— Dark White House Press Secretary (@lacadri34) September 15, 2021
To be fair, Kasie Hunt is merely the latest personality on cable TV “news” channels to engage in nearly fact-free reporting. During the last month, for example, as indicated by Hunt’s last tweet above, CNN and other media outlets had an explosion of erroneously critical coverage of President Biden’s historic evacuation of over 100,000 U.S. and allied personnel, Afghans who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas (SIVs), and other vulnerable people from Afghanistan. Such coverage included this infamous outburst of feelings on CNN that also proved to be disastrously wrong:
CNN’s @clarissaward in Kabul: “I'm sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven't seen a single US plane take off. How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.”
— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) August 20, 2021
Given this context, the problem with Kasie Hunt’s dunderheaded take on Newsom’s landslide victory, yet again, wasn’t just that Hunt appeared clueless, it’s that she was so biased against the Democratic politician. For example, Hunt completely missed the fact that (a) Newsom challenger Larry Elder is a very famous right wing radio personality, and (b) California has a history of famous media figures getting plenty of votes in elections. Often, as opposed to Elder, these other personalities actually win their elections, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and Sony Bono, to name a few. Thus, it should have been no surprise that, as to the group of challengers to Newsom, Elder received the most votes on Tuesday. Indeed, it now turns out that Elder’s campaign may have been intended as a publicity stunt or an attempt to leverage a higher salary for the job he really wants, which is of course at Fox “News”:
Knew it. pic.twitter.com/nxKfPUWsZN
— Faith Back Rub (@FaithRubPol) September 15, 2021
Unfortunately, Kasie Hunt’s reporting failure is also reminiscent of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during Barack Obama‘s presidency, where Blitzer seemed to end every item with the loaded question, “How does this hurt President Obama?” We already have a “Fox ‘News’ Watch” category here at Messaging Matters, where we monitor and comment on some of the hopelessly one-sided coverage of that network. It now appears that we will have to add a “CNN Watch” category as well.
Photo by U.S. Secretary of Defense, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/PzDJyP
