CNN Gets The Vapors; Not To Mention An Enormous Case Of Hypocrisy

This is rich. CNN, was the network whose anchorman helped to popularize the left’s homophobic “tea bagging” slur last year to insult half the country. Their in-field reporter was fired after she inserted herself into the story by insulting those attending the April 15th tea party in Chicago last year.

One year later though, with their ratings so in free fall that even the New York Times can’t hide it, they’re newly concerned about tone.

The tea partiers, not their own, of course, as Ed Morrissey writes:

CNN reminds its readers today that dissent is patriotic barely tolerable in the Age of Obama.   In a report after the Tax Day Tea Parties grabbed so much attention, the news network — which also relies on the First Amendment — spends quite a bit of column space fretting over voter anger expressed at … well, peaceful public assemblies…For instance, we have the usual people getting the usual PC vapors over the use of language in politics:

[Dr. Jerrold] Post said he is concerned, however, about messages coming from the conservative base. Last month, GOP chief Michael Steele called for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be put on “the firing line,” and House Minority Leader John Boehner said that a congressman “might be a dead man” because of his health care vote.

“I find some of this rhetoric recently — ‘reload’ — quite scary,” Post said of a Twitter post by Sarah Palin directing followers to her Facebook page, which had crosshairs on the districts of 20 congressmen who voted for the controversial health care bill. “Some people are going to hear that as, ‘Take up your arms.’ “

Gee, it’s a good thing that Dr. Post never bothered to watch television in the US between 1966 and 1999, when William F. Buckley hosted a show called … “The Firing Line.” It was such a radical and dangerous show that it won an Emmy in 1969. These phrases are commonly used in politics, and have been for decades. Only when the commentariat decided to paint voter unhappiness over the radical agenda and skyrocketing spending of Democrats in power as something dangerous did the media decide to parse the linguistics of politics.

And again, none of these quotes even came from the rallies themselves. If CNN couldn’t find anything objectionable at the Tea Party rallies, despite embedding a producer and reporter in them, then why run this story at all?

Update: HA reader Pam Meister from Big Hollywood asks: “Say, didn’t CNN used to have a program called … Crossfire?”

But that program debuted in a more confident era, before the Frankfurt School’s language police had completely worked over society. Or at least the overculture.