This Is CNN

Journalist who said Romney “happy to party with black people drowning” is now CNN’s political director, Brendan Bordelon writes at the Daily Caller:

Cable news network CNN has promoted David Chalian — a man fired in 2012 from Yahoo News for claiming the GOP is “happy to party with black people drowning” — to the powerful position of political director.

“As we head into midterm election season and begin to lay the groundwork for the coming presidential campaign, it gives us great pleasure to announce that David Chalian has accepted the position of CNN Political Director,” an announcement from the network, obtained by FishbowlDC, read.

Chalian was hired by CNN last July to be the supervising producer for “Crossfire,” the political debate program brought back to the network last summer after an eight-year hiatus.

But Chalian had previously worked as Yahoo News’ Washington bureau chief until August 2012, when he was summarily fired over a hot-mic incident during live coverage of the ongoing Republican National Convention held in Tampa, Florida.

Objectivity — you’re doing it wrong, CNN. But then, as Glenn Reynolds likes to say, most members of the MSM really are simply Democrat operatives with bylines.

Speaking of doing it wrong, as Tony Lee recently noted at Big Journalism, “CNN boss Jeff Zucker wants to revamp the struggling network, but nobody reportedly wants to work there:”

A CNN source told the New York Post that the unstable network is having problems recruiting key talent to a place that was once known as “the most trusted name in news.”

“We can’t find talent who wants to come to CNN. No one wants to come because we scrap things after a year,” the source told the Post. “Every talent agency we contact can’t get us anyone… Even talent from larger local markets refuse to come here, because they are afraid.”

Daytime anchors Brooke Baldwin and Carol Costello will reportedly be moving from Atlanta to New York to be closer to Zucker while Don Lemon is angling for a primetime show, even though nearly every in-house talent the network has tried to force upon its primetime viewers has tanked.

CNN’s ratings have plummeted the more the network tries to conceal its liberal biases and masquerades as an “objective” station. That may even be changing, as Zucker recently admitted that even though the network’s own viewers are not interested in CNN’s climate change stories, he will try to find more creative ways to force them to care.

“Climate change is one of those stories that deserves more attention, that we all talk about, but we haven’t figured out how to engage the audience in that story in a meaningful way,” Zucker recently said at an awards dinner in New York. “When we do do those stories, there does tend to be a tremendous amount of lack of interest on the audience’s part.”

Perhaps it’s because they know that if CNN can’t convince its colleagues working down the hall in other branches of the giant Time-Warner-CNN-HBO entertainment conglomerate that global warming is a crisis, there’s no reason for them to worry about the issue.

Earlier this year, Time-Warner-owned Sports Illustrated hired a converted Boeing airliner to fly model Kate Upton in simulated zero-gravity conditions, merely for a photo shoot. Such frivolous gestures graphically illustrate that a corporation that has chided both the general public and President Obama specifically for imagined environmental damage caused by excessive jet travel clearly isn’t concerned about its own carbon footprint.

(They illustrate other details too, but these aren’t quite as germane to the topics of our post…)