Someone Set Up Us the CNN

How bad a week did CNN have? Even Jon Stewart is dumping on his fellow liberal wannabe-journalists there today:

After giving credit to NBC News and giving the New York Post some gentle ribbing, Stewart moved on to his primary target. He suspected CNN may have taken some of his advice from the week before, as they notably stopped speculating as much as they had been before the suspects were identified. “It’s a much more responsible way of broadcasting than your usual ‘say it first and have Anderson Cooper correct it later.’”

Stewart reserved special disdain for CNN reporter Deborah Feyerick, who had lot to say about some barking dogs. He said something his dog just “stares out the window and barks even when there’s nothing out there. Sometimes he licks his own genitals. You can’t always read a lot into what they do… news-wise.”

But even worse was CNN correspondent Susan Candiotti, who let this gem pass her lips about Boston under lockdown: “It’s as though a bomb had dropped somewhere.”

“Yes, it does seem like that sometimes,” Stewart said with his head in his hands. “It’s not so much a metaphor as, what actually happened.”

Oh, and speaking of bombs and CNN, as Twitchy notes, CNN ran a segment today demonstrating how to build and detonate a pressure cooker bomb:

Has it really been more than 20 years since “Dateline NBC” showed us how to blow up a pickup truck using a simple model rocket engine? These days we have the Internet to show us how to build explosives, but it’s nice to know TV news is still there for us. How easy is it to make one of those pressure cooker bombs like those used in the Boston Marathon terrorist attack? It’s so simple, even CNN can do it. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

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We’re sure CNN has a very good reason for showing how easy it is to build a weapon of mass destruction. We don’t know what that reason is, though. Kermit Gosnell’s trial was postponed today because the defense attorney called in sick, so they must have had some extra time to fill.

At least at the moment, you can find the video online fairly easily, but I’m not linking to it here. It’s sort of vaguely reminiscent of David Letterman’s late-1980s heyday, when he would drop stuff off tall buildings or place objects in industrial presses, because watching stuff go boom makes for fun goofy video. Letterman was being ironic by being deliberately stupid on television. What’s CNN’s excuse?

Besides — if you profess to believe that mere clip art and weapons-related language can kill — as CNN was pretending to believe two years ago — isn’t actually demonstrating how to build a bomb a remarkably ill-conceived idea? Or does CNN simply no internal collective memory of its past programming?