Cnn

Jim Acosta is an edgy, edgy man. You can tell because he uses the word "bullshit" on live TV, which in this year of our edgelord 2021 still retains a good 1 percent of its taboo. So it was that Acosta on CNN last week honored Tucker Carlson with his "Bullshit Factory Employee of the Year" award, which sounds like a throwaway joke Jon Stewart scribbled on a steno pad while off on an Ambien sleepwalk. The entire Acosta segment was unspeakably sad — and not just because he's supposed to be one of the more respected reporters at The Most Trusted Name in News™®©. It's because CNN's relationship to Fox has become one of clinically committable obsession. Its personalities are forever playing Fox clips and trashing them. And they're not the only ones.

Are you a sexist and a racist? For her supporters, that’s the only possible explanation for why Vice President Kamala Harris is so unpopular. A pair of dovetailing pieces this weekend in Politico and CNN extensively document how hard done by the Veep feels by the Biden administration. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jasmine Wright write that Harris allies “fume that she's not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined” and that Harris herself “has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically.” Politico says that Harris’s “allies outside of the administration have argued she’s been set up for failure by the portfolio she’s been handed.

Ex-governor of New York Andrew Cuomo has been named on a criminal complaint for “forcible touching the sexual or intimate parts for the purpose of degrading or abusing another person.” How the mighty fall. This time last year Cuomo was riding high on popularity nationwide as the go-to pandemic politician. There were whispers of him replacing Joe Biden on the ticket for president. All the major news networks fawned over him and helped him win an Emmy award for his “effective use of television during the pandemic.”  Cuomo and his giant ego later remarked that the Emmy board members forgot to mention his “sense of humor, charisma, good looks or charm.

Is it more worrying that President Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge? Nobody has the power to force a president to undergo the indignities that Biden went through on Thursday night’s CNN town hall. As with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, either someone convinced him to do it or he insisted on doing it. Either way, you could not watch him, clenching his fists as though holding a Zimmer frame while Anderson Cooper spoon-fed him a prompt, without feeling that we are heading nowhere good. On the same day that Donald Trump evoked the ghosts of Soviet propaganda by launching a social-media app called Truth — the Russian translation is Pravda — Joe Biden attempted a Brezhnev-era theatrical of his own.

Chris Cuomo won’t give CNN, or his very concerned social justice warrior colleagues, a break. Cuomo is arguably the face of the network. That’s a serious problem for Jim Acosta’s anti-Fox News jihad, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy’s Media Matters rip-off gig, Jake Tapper’s 'last honest man in Washington' act and Wolf Blitzer still trying to pretend he’s just the straight news guy. Cuomo has eclipsed them all. Hence his magical COVID basement Lazarus miracle last year. Hence also the circus act with his now-humiliated brother and all the special favors that come from that kind of family connection.

It’s becoming spooky season, by which I mean not Halloween but elections — at least in Virginia and New Jersey, which have gubernatorial races. They are, incidentally, two of the three states I’ve lived in (I’m in Virginia now; the other one was Maryland). National elections have ceased to be fun for some time now, and I’m not sure my own state’s gubernatorial race is going to be much better. I’m supposed to choose between a washed-up former governor and a businessman-turned-political-neophyte who enthusiastically hawks his endorsement by the businessman-turned-political-neophyte who last occupied the White House.

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy. To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first.

Liberal journalists and politicos are obsessed with the truth. The truth, besides Donald J. Trump and Fox News, is their favorite topic. In October, former Clinton administration secretary of labor Robert Reich called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help name every person ‘whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe’. In February, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose suggested President Biden appoint a ‘reality czar’. Speaking of Biden, during a campaign stop in 2020, Joe told a crowd in Iowa that ‘we choose truth over facts’. After the speech, MSNBC informed their readers that Trump supporters were pouncing on Biden’s ‘harmless mistake’.

Did anyone else catch the sordid humiliation porn screened on CNN Thursday? The nine-minute clip featured a MILF-cum-dominatrix who works under the name Alisyn Camerota and a promising new adult star called Jeffrey Toobin (onlyfans.com/jeffreytoobin). It was Toobin's first appearance on the AVN-award-winning network since his eight-month stint in a dungeon. The little-pig-boy, 61, was locked up after one of his cam-shows went awry at his other employer, a top-shelf skin mag called the New Yorker. 'It's been a while,' Camerota begins. 'It has been a while indeed,' Toobin replies with a wry smile. Camerota then 'recaps' where Toobin has been for the last few months, as the two giggle to themselves. https://twitter.com/alisyncamerota/status/1403071356925775872?

What exactly are the qualifications to host a show on CNN? The most obvious seems to be an astonishing lack of professional shame — and I’m not even talking about the circus act Chris Cuomo’s been doing for the past year. Reliable Sources is the most ironically named show in all of cable news, given that the guest roster regularly includes Dan Rather. On this Sunday’s episode, host Brian Stelter partook in a highly embarrassing act of professional self-debasement, in a segment in which he offered schoolgirl giggles and petty star-gazing over White House press secretary Jen Psaki. Stelter acted like a privileged fan of Psaki, giddy to just be basking in her celebrity aura for a brief moment of her precious time.

Andrew Cuomo is the most shamelessly transparent governor in America. And why shouldn’t he be? The man has never been subtle about who he is — and up until now, it has always worked for him. For the duration of his career in politics, the scion of former New York governor Mario Cuomo was the media’s darling. But times change faster than Dr Fauci’s views on mask wearing. Now Gov. Cuomo finds himself frequently described in the press as a man with ‘mushrooming scandals’. Going from ‘America’s Boyfriend’, as Marie Claire’s Michelle Collins dubbed him, to ‘America’s Delusional and Unstable Ex’ can’t be an easy transition. This has become abundantly clear from Cuomo’s unhinged press conferences.

The Washington Post issued a mammoth correction this week on a story about Donald Trump's search for election fraud. The paper had admitted that they misquoted the former president twice. WaPo’s botched story is a cautionary tale of what happens when political biases cloud reportage and a reminder of why public trust in the media is so low. The original story, which was reported in January and written by Amy Gardner, broke the news that Trump had a December phone call with Georgia's top election investigator about the 2020 presidential election results. The scoop was sourced to an 'individual briefed on the call', who claimed Trump urged the official to 'find the fraud' and promised she'd be a 'national hero' if she did so.