{"id":29583,"date":"2015-09-05T16:14:04","date_gmt":"2015-09-05T23:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=29583"},"modified":"2015-09-06T09:37:22","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T16:37:22","slug":"foxified-cnn-taps-sarah-palin-and-hugh-hewitt-for-2016-campaign-coverage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=29583","title":{"rendered":"Foxified: CNN Taps Sarah Palin And Hugh Hewitt For 2016 Campaign Coverage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The decline of CNN<\/a> has been in progress for several years now. It is a network that is struggling with an acute personality disorder. It wants very badly to emulate the ratings success of Fox News, but it has no idea why Fox is popular. They seem to think it has something to do with presenting a conservative slant on the news. But that is not how Fox became king of the cable news hill.<\/p>\n

Fox succeeds by seducing the most extreme right-wing viewers with media trickery that mirrors entertainment programming, such as flashy graphics and audio, manufactured conflict, and soft porn in both their stories and anchors. But CNN’s misunderstanding of these tactics has led them to make glaring mistakes that fail to produce any positive results for their ratings or their journalistic integrity. The latest examples of this doomed strategy include the recent announcement of two conservative mouthpieces who will be featured prominently in their election programming.<\/p>\n

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First we have Sarah Palin. That’s right, having been ditched by Fox News, CNN is throwing her a life preserver and bringing her aboard to provide campaign analysis on this Sunday’s “State of the Union.”<\/em> It’s hard to imagine what insight they think she will bring to the discussion on presidential politics. Her own experience was fraught with embarrassing episodes that only demonstrated how woefully ill-prepared she was for public service at that level. And since then she has only succeeded in distinguishing herself as an ignorant hack with negligible comprehension of the issues that face the nation. Nevertheless, CNN has tapped her to toss her word salad ravings on their network’s signature political program.<\/p>\n

Secondly we have Hugh Hewitt, a starkly partisan wingnut who will be featured on CNN’s Republican debate this month. CNN could have selected actual journalists to pose questions to the candidates, but instead they picked only a stalwart Republican radio talk show host (and no one from the left) who will join CNN’s Jake Tapper.<\/p>\n

Of course, conservatives are capable of asking tough questions when they want to. However, when they do they will be insulted and dismissed by the candidates and the GOP constituents. Just ask Megyn Kelly<\/a>. Hewitt himself is taking heat for an interview he did with Donald Trump that demonstrated how ignorant Trump is on foreign affairs. Typical of Trump, he is now hammering Hewitt for what he calls “gotcha”<\/em> questions. [Note: To Republicans, gotcha questions are any question they are too dumb to answer]<\/em> In this case, the real problem for Trump was not whether he had been ambushed, but that his answer was at first a lie, followed by obvious ignorance. Check out the first 30 seconds of this video:<\/p>\n