I have been watching CNN daily for over two weeks now. During this time, CNN’s coverage centered almost exclusively on the election, and almost exclusively on Donald Trump—his bad points and bad things he did. CNN in general has been pretty fair during this: Trump’s supporters and staff were invited on to defend him and were given time to speak their minds. Points against Trump, although sometimes facetious, were other times nuanced and thoughtful.
This is interesting in itself: CNN isn’t super biased in this area if you watch CNN for long enough to get the nuances of the points they are making as well as hearing what Trump’s supporters have to say. They give enough uncut footage for viewers to be able to make up their own minds.
But if you turn the TV on at any point in the day, you can’t miss the anti-Trump pro-Hillary agenda that CNN is pushing, and pushing hard. CNN is trying to destroy Trump.
If CNN is trying so hard to destroy him, devoting the majority of their airtime to it, then why aren’t they doing a better job? They’ve definitely been throwing some weak attacks.
CNN topic arcs for the past weeks have been:
- Trump University might be a fraud.
- Hillary Clinton “owns” Trump in speech.
- Gorilla is needlessly killed.
- Trump pays women less than men.
- Trump is racist for saying judge can’t do his job because he’s Mexican.
- Paul Ryan “slams” Trump for saying this, but supports him anyway? Republican Party is weak?
- Bill Clinton finally gets involved! Gives a speech bashing Trump. Trump is covertly saying that he wants to take us back to our racist past.
- Super Tuesday coming up!
- Clinton wins, makes history
These Headlines can be reinterpreted as:
- Trump University might be a fraud. The worst thing that Trump did as multibillionaire CEO is start a possibly fraudulent education program.
- Hillary Clinton owns Trump in speech by framing her speech around insults and arguments that high-schoolers and college students have been saying for over 6 months, appealing to people’s sense of fear. Instead of focusing on her own accomplishments, which given her “experience,” as a seasoned politician should be easy, she calls Trump a racist and says he will destroy the country.
- Gorilla is needlessly killed (and this is worse than Christians beheaded by ISIS in Libya so we’ll give it 6 times more coverage)
- Trump pays women less than men. Note that this number isn’t controlled for rank, and that he pays both men and women more than Hillary pays men.
- Trump says racist thing about judge. He can’t think of a reason why people are still suing Trump University, so he suggests Judge might be biased because he’s of Mexican Heritage. Whether the suit is legally fine or not, he seems genuinely bewildered about why it hasn’t been thrown out yet. Still an idiotic thing to say.
- Paul Ryan slams Trump, but supports him anyway. Ryan says that saying a person can’t do his job because of his heritage is the definition of racism, and explains that he can have disagreements with Trump while still supporting him over Clinton. Nobody brings up the crazy race and gender pandering that the Clinton campaign has done that Trump refuses to do. Nothing bad that Hillary has done is actually brought up, and if it is, it’s brief enough to miss.
- Bill Clinton finally comes out! He gives a speech bashing Trump. He says that people from the south all know that what Donald Trump means by “Make America Great Again” is to take America back to racism, instead of what Trump has been saying this whole time: That he wants to take America back to when it was safe for Americans to travel abroad and when American Exceptionalism wasn’t a scorned idea.
- Super Tuesday coming up! Hillary will surely win! Hillary was supposed to have this ages ago. She earned this.
- Hillary wins, gives speech pandering to women. Uses tone and language reminiscent of Sanders and Obama.
Viewers can tell what CNN is trying to do: CNN is trying to destroy a candidacy and win an election, so why are they throwing cheap shots? With the resources at their disposal, is this the best they can come up with to harm Donald Trump? Are they trying to keep up appearances of neutrality? Is someone paying them to run these stories? Are these kind of stories just cheap to produce, because they don’t need a lot of men on the ground? Do anchors and correspondents just enjoy talking about these topics? Is there another story here?
