CNN goes back to the future, and not just in their permanent love of socialist politics. In addition to dusting off its old “THIS IS CNN” station IDs recorded by James Earl Jones seemingly immediately after the Battle of Yavin (who these days thinks that the network’s last remaining viewer is a racist), the badly listing news channel is also considering bringing back the one show firmly associated with the CNN brand name:
After the failed week long experiment of (Get To) The Point and the unsteady The Lead With Jake Tapper, Jeff Zucker is looking for a blast from the past to revive CNN. The ratings-struggling cable new network is bringing back Crossfire in June, network insiders tell me. No hosts have been chosen yet, the sources say. Nor is it clear if the show will definitely remain a half hour, as the original Crossfire was, or go longer. Right now it seems that Crossfire 2.0 is slated to have a variety of CNN personalities and contributors taking up the “left” and “right” roles on the new version of the political debate show.
But back on January 19, 2011, during the height of the angry left’s brief “new civility” tirade, CNN had this treacly moment:
On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.
The person who all the crosshairs at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO were aimed at back then punches back twice as hard this week at the conglomerate’s hypocrisy:
In a Facebook note on Sunday, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin blasted CNN for the network’s hypocrisy in potentially bringing back a show called Crossfire just two years after the network falsely implied Palin’s “crossfire” icons on a map that “targeted” pro-Obamacare Representatives were responsible for the attempted murder of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ).
CNN is reportedly going to bring back Crossfire, the debate show the network canceled in June 2005.
“Wasn’t CNN among those who issued blistering criticism about the use of a ‘crossfire’ icon in 2010 to represent political districts we wished to see represented by commonsense conservatives?” Palin asked.
On the night Giffords was shot on January 8, 2011, CNN, without any evidence whatsoever in a segment the network would later come to regret, implied Palin’s 2010 map played a role in inciting the violence. They discussed how Palin’s use of the phrase, “don’t retreat, reload,” may have also created an environment that made the shooting possible.
As Palin noted, “CNN, among others, implied that using a ‘crossfire’ icon (which was a tactic first employed by Democrats to illustrate political maps of districts they ‘targeted’ to win) was inciting violence.”
CNN, along with other mainstream media networks, refused to acknowledge all the examples of Democrats having used “crossfire” icons to “target” districts while rushing to link Palin to the attempted murder of Giffords and the murder of six others.
Perhaps CNN could ask King to be the host of Crossfire in the left-hand seat, to complete their latest of many trips to the Memory Hole and back.
Speaking of Orwellian metaphors and leftwing cable opinion channels, as Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller writes at The Week regarding MSNBC, if your commercials are starting to sound reminiscent of loudspeaker broadcasts from the Inner Party of Oceania, you might want to check your premises:
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