The troll is under the ratings bridge
This is essentially an “Open Letter to My Fellow Conservatives” kind of thing but that would have made the title way too long. We’re heading into tough love territory so please remember as we proceed that I am one of the elders of the village and bring a fair amount of political and media wisdom to the table whenever I swagger into the room.
There is a certain class of bottom-feeding leftist media type that would have almost no audience at all were it not for outraged conservatives paying attention to them. They are the consummate trolls, knowing exactly which buttons to push to provoke a complete news cycle’s worth of attention, almost all of it coming from conservative news sites and conservatives on social media.
I fully understand the temptation. Don Lemon is always going to say and do stupid things. Heck, we could do a daily “Don Lemon Did Something Stupid” column here and never worry about running out of material. Here’s the thing though: he’s doing it deliberately. OK, some of it is done just because he’s an idiot lefty, but much of it is designed to get a rise out of people on the right.
Lemon knows that he’s broadcasting on a network that has been in the ratings toilet for years and shows no signs of ever getting out of it. You could put a snake swallowing a rat on camera for eight hours a day and it would trounce CNN in the ratings. Lemon needs to troll to get any real attention.
You want real temptation? Jennifer Rubin used to write for us here at PJ Media before she headed for the turncoat gold. I want to jump through the computer and yell at her every time I see the latest lame (she’s just phoning it in these days) troll tweet of hers.
Fredo is a problem, too
Chris Cuomo is another serial troll offender. He likes to team up with Don Lemon for the double troll effect from time to time. They’re fond of doing these smirking little babble sessions where they say the most outlandish things. It’s like they are baiting a hook that they know that around eighty-percent of the conservatives on social media will bite for the next twenty-four hours.
I don’t think that everyone at CNN is a troll. A good many of them are very earnest and have probably deluded themselves into thinking that they’re actually speaking to an audience somewhere outside of airport terminals. And everyone at MSNBC is drunk on the Kool-Aid, of course. The three I’m highlighting here are the worst of the trolls. I could throw in some of the more notorious members of the Never Trump club but I really don’t like giving them any attention. Ever.
Then there’s Jennifer Rubin
Yes, I know that Jennifer Rubin is a Never Trumper, but she’s been in media all along and there is a particular reason that she irritates me. The outrage over Rubin is always the same. People just loooove to point out that Rubin used to be “a conservative.”
I disagree with that.
Oh, there is plenty of seemingly conservative material out there written by Rubin prior to her Trump Derangement Syndrome affliction. I just don’t think any of it was genuine.
There are a few journos out there who I truly believe faked being conservative to further their careers. I won’t mention most of them by name, but our girl Jen is already in the mix for this column so we’ll stick with her. Being the squish Republican journo can help one stand out easier than being just another one of the thousands of lefties in the business.
Media outlets like to keep one token conservative around as cover so they can claim to not be completely biased. Here’s the bonus: the token conservative doesn’t even have to be conservative! Republican-ish will do. In Rubin’s case, she hasn’t written so much as a right-leaning word since President Trump got into office but still laughingly refers to herself as “conservative” in her Twitter bio. Even WaPo doesn’t call her a conservative anymore.
Rubin doesn’t just complain about Trump, she routinely praises Democrats. That’s not a transition one makes just because one doesn’t like a particular president.
When she writes or tweets something outrageous, no one is “owning” her by pointing that she said something different four or five years ago. Believe me, she’s aware. She loves the attention, even if it is negative. In fact, she may be one of the better Twitter trolls on either side right now. Don’t give her the satisfaction of a reaction. The 2,347,846th “BUT YOU SAID SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN 2015!” reply really isn’t having any impact.
Cuomo and Lemon are always yukking it up because they know that they’re about to troll their way into a day’s worth of free publicity on conservative media and social media.
Whenever I talk about this with conservative friends and colleagues, most try to convince me that we need to pay attention to these people to hold them accountable. I hate to tell you this, but accountability went out the window at liberal media outlets decades ago. How many journalists have been held accountable for spending three years peddling the lie about Russian collusion?
The bottom line is that we shouldn’t be giving them relevance that they don’t have by paying attention to them. I know that may seem odd given that I just wrote a thousand words about them but, trust me, I won’t be doing this again any time soon.
Let Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo pat each other on the back in their ratings wasteland. Let Jennifer Rubin think she’s clever because a bunch of idiot liberals are slobbering all over her.
Just don’t let them troll you and put you to work for them
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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way.. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.
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