CNN is as Excited about the California Killing As George Santos at a Panty Sale
By
David Gottfried
Tomorrow I will have my hair cut, and I am not looking forward to it. My barber is a well-meaning sort of chap, but unfortunately, he is a male version of a Jewish yenta and is given to interminable babbling about all matters, large and small, and his conclusions and inferences are mostly trivial and trite.
Most of all, he likes to babble about the News. He considers himself very well informed because, like denizens of old age homes and mental institutions everywhere, he listens to the boob tube blatherers on networks such as CNN.
Yesterday, I was in a depressive funk, and I have to concede I behaved like a mental patient, i.e., I listened to CNN.
If you are on planet earth, you are aware that yesterday, Sunday January 22, was a day when the mass media outlets and purveyors of small minded, yenta-like logic decided that there was only one news story in the world to report and that news story was the killing of 10 people in California because of a madman busting up a Lunar New Year’s festival.
If one watched CNN at 1:10 AM, or 3:40 AM. or 5:55 P.M. one saw the same thing, a white van being intimate with two black vans at either end, and one heard the same thing. The word heard more than anything was Tragedy. This favorite word of the Mongoloid Media was uttered about once every 7 minutes. Suffice it to say that not a single, solitary member of the highly telegenic and resolutely lobotomized know-nothings on television is the least bit familiar with the very specific meaning of tragedy as the term was used by the Greeks.
Now don’t get me wrong. The killing was terrible. However, CNN had nothing to report other than the sentence, “There was a shooting, in connection with a lunar new year’s festival, and 10 people lost their lives.” They did not have the name of the shooter(s), his motive, his whereabouts, if he had any allies, etc. The entirety of what they had to relay could have been done in 15 seconds, but they said the same damn thing for 15 hours.
And tomorrow, while I am getting my hair cut, my barber will utter the word tragedy at least 15 times, confident that his mastery of a big word, sporting 3 whole syllables, makes him a good, obsequious Russian immigrant to this country, properly condemning all things Slavic while extolling everything Anglo Saxon, white bread, Baptist and bland.
I am probably being too hard on my barber. He is an uneducated man, and he has spent his entire life working for a living and never had a moment to contemplate and analyze anything except the quality of a haircut.
Instead, I should berate my fellow Americans, those highly compensated college graduates who, as Bob Dylan told us in “Like a Rolling Stone,” only used to get juiced in school.
I am mad at these college graduates, who are members of the mass media, because they perpetuate the big delusion that the mass media is a disputatious, querulous aggressive force that is adamantly liberal and intent on attacking the power structure.
However, if the mass media was the least bit aggressive it would not spend the entirety of a Sunday with its camera lens focused on a white van (and too black vans ravishing it) and an audio recording the lamentations of an inane a-hole boohooing about tragedy. However, the intellectual dingbats at CNN do this all the time. Whenever a story has some blood and gore, and that story is mixed in with racial hatred or racial difference or racial anything, their emotional antennae is tickled pink and as excited as George Santos at a panty sale, and their allegedly liberal ears and eyes zoom in for a blockbuster newscast of exploitation and abuse.
Ah, but you will tell me that CNN is such a fine and upstanding media outlet because it so judiciously recounts the criminality and corruption of all that is Trump, but Trump and CNN are truly the best of friends. In 2016, on half the afternoons on any given day, CNN aired Trump rallies in full, giving their favorite Fuhrer the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in free air time. The more CNN bashes Trump, the more Trump’s supporters rally ‘round their ostracized king. The more Trump bashes CNN, the better for CNN’s ratings.
If CNN were a truly aggressive and questioning force, it would unravel the mangling web of corporate obfuscations and legal abominations that are forgotten by every conning pol in Washington save Bernie Sanders. If CNN had half-way decent reporters, they would tell you that 1) the Sachler family, which sent fraudulent reports to the FDA, to downplay the addictive potential of Oxycontin, has taken all of their money out of their corporate accounts so their assets won’t be touched in the event of a judgement adverse to their interests, 2) they would tell you that while the incomes of CEOs were on average 50 times greater than the incomes of factory workers in the 1960’s that ratio is now 500 to 1, iii) that the communications that Wiki leaks obtained from John Podesta contained information regarding Hillary’s comments to industrialists, that she refused to make public, that conclusively established that Hillary Clinton was in favor of untrammeled free trade and no protections for American workers or the environment, and iv) that the United States arguably incited Russia’s attack on the Ukraine just as it incited Sadaam’s attack on Kuwait by advising Sadaam, through April Glaspie, that the US would not choose sides in any disputes between Arab states and incited North Korea’s invasion of South Korea by announcing to the world, through Secretary of State Dean Acheson, that the US security perimeter did not extend west of Japan and would not encompass South Korea. (Footnote 1)
Figure it out. The truth is staring you in the face: The war in the Ukraine is music to Washington’s ears because Russia, against all prognostications, is getting clobbered. (Compare this altercation with Prague in 1968 and Hungary in 1956) The West knew how it would clobber Russia through the advanced use of cyber devices. The West knew it would win this war so it incited Russia to attack by violating its pledge not to move NATO one mile to the East when it lunged more than 1000 miles to the East, making many states that were allied with Hitler members of NATO, including Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Croatia.
The status of progressive politics in this country has rarely been so bad. We have a President who has been so partial to corporate hegemony that he was known by his Senate colleagues as the Senator from Mastercard, who is as anti-communist and anti-Russian as John Foster Dulles and Joe Mc Carthy, and CNN, the babbling yenta of the airwaves, has the unmitigated gall to consider Biden a progressive. Sure, Biden is progressive next to Trump and Kevin Mc Carthy, but then again George Wallace looks progressive next to Trump and Mc Carthy.
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Footnote 1: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/did-america-set-the-same-trap-for
I like getting my hair cut about as much as getting a physical exam, probably less. My barber talks about pop culture. I hate pop culture. I must remind him each visit that I don't watch Netflix or the like and cannot relate to his ramblings about whatever hackneyed drama is popular that week.
I occasionally watch CNN, though it only lasts for fifteen minutes. I also watch snippets of other networks here and there, a mixture of views and political propaganda. CNN does love to latch onto shootings, especially when race is involved. It also digs up some of the most absurd racial statistics.
CNN’s coverage is limited to race, shootings, Trump, the alphabet group, and oppression.
I have nothing to back the following claim, but I'm certain CNN’s ratings have plummeted since Trump’s chaotic departure from the White House. Still, it won't pass up any opportunity to spend half of a segment complaining about him.
Did you ever see how excited CNN had been during the George Floyd riots? It had nonstop coverage from every city. And in the mornings, when nothing was happening, because rioters get sleepy, it would follow a reporter roaming empty streets: “As you can see, this window is broken. If you look closely, you can see there’s some broken glass down here.” Then CNN would repeatedly play footage of a kid smashing the window with a trash can as though it were a Gif.