CNN International correspondent Diana Magnay referred to a group of Israelis as “scum” after she claimed that they were standing on a hill near the town of Sderot cheering as bombs landed in Gaza, according to a screen-shot of the comment captured by National Review.
“Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #Gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong’. Scum,” Magnay tweeted and then quickly deleted, though it was retweeted nearly 250 times before being taken down.
Magnay has been removed from covering the conflict and CNN issued an apology for her tweet.
Which they do on a regular basis when their correspondents express their true feelings regarding the Middle East. Right around this time in 2010, I wrote:
I must confess that as one of the vast majority of Americans who no longer watches CNN unless trapped in an airport, I hadn’t heard of Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor of Mideast affairs, until I stumbled over a YouTube clip of her discussing the Gaza flotilla for today’s “Cold Civil War” video. But, she’s now the latest CNN journalist to let the mask slip on her biases via Twitter. Or as as the URL of Daniel Helper’s post at the Weekly Standard describes succinctly, “cnn-editor-mourns-loss-terrorist:”
How did CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs Octavia Nasr celebrate July 4? By mourning the passing of Hezbollah’s Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Here’s what the CNN editor posted on her Twitter account:
Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot..#Lebanon
I grabbed a screen shot of Nasr’s Twitter, both to illustrate this post, and because Tweets from leftwing old media figures occasionally seem to disappear from time to time.* “Oddly enough,” as Reuters, a news agency with a similar worldview as CNN, might say.
After Nasr was pushed out of CNN, I wrote:
Hey, Nasr was just carrying on where former CNN propagandist reporter Peter Arnett, soon-to-be departed Christiane Amanpour, and former head honcho Eason Jordan all left off. (Not to mention founder Ted Turner.) Unfortunately, much like Jordan himself when he preposterously declared at Davos in 2005 that US troops in Iraq were deliberately targeting journalists (after admitting that he was perfectly cool working for a former Iraqi dictator who was busy targeting US troops), Nasr also dropped the mask, and eliminated any shred of “objectivity.”
She eventually wound-up at MBC — the Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Center. Perhaps MBC considers CNN their farm team.
During a 2004 conversation with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, Roger Ailes of ratings champ Fox News had harsh words for CNN International, the network that employs Diana Magnay, as the clip atop this page illustrates.
Could Ailes’ boss finally put CNN out of its misery? The odds seem stacked against him (and those of us who are forced to watch CNN in airport departure lounges and other public spaces), but note the hilarious opening to this L.A. Times article on Rupert Murdoch’s possible takeover of Time-Warner:
Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes is in an uncomfortable position: The cross hairs of Rupert Murdoch.
For the last six years, Bewkes has presided over Time Warner, a genteel media company known for its sterling assets such as HBO, CNN and Warner Bros. movie and television studio. He has also systematically shed problematic assets, including AOL and magazine unit Time Inc.
The reshaping of Time Warner made the company more lean but inadvertently made it a perfect takeover target. And now Murdoch and his 21st Century Fox team are banging on the door.
As the numerous Kinsley-style gaffes from Magnay, Nasr, Amanpour, Jordan, and others past and present at CNN illustrate, Time-Warner hasn’t been “genteel” and “sterling” since Henry Luce and Jack Warner retired to the big country club in the sky. As a result of its TV news division becoming a black hole of shoddy reporting, wild speculation, and crude anti-democracy bias, no wonder it’s been shedding ratings as quickly as its reputation.
* Fortunately, Twitchy now exists to preserve some of the more depraved micro-utterances of the left. Here’s their post on Diana Magnay’s meltdown.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member