Is CNN Now Taking Rush Limbaugh's Advice?

A few weeks ago the top-rated radio broadcaster offered some unsolicited advice to the now little-watched television “network” to boost their viewership:

With CNN firmly entrenched in the abyss of the ratings sewer, radio host Rush Limbaugh is predicting a shift in the political viewpoint of the cable news network.

“I think I figured out what CNN’s gonna do to try to recapture their lost glory,” Limbaugh said this afternoon on his top-rated program.

“I think they’re gonna move further to the left, try to even ‘out-left’ MSNBC. That’s based on a couple of things I’ve seen. It’s too early to know for certain. Too soon to tell right now. But it looks to me like that CNN is gonna move even further left in their valiant effort to recapture the 98 percent of their audience that they’ve lost since the 1980s.”

Flash-forward to this weekend. At Power Line yesterday, John Hinderaker wrote:

CNN represents the passive-aggressive Left. MSNBC is unrestrained id, but CNN can never fully surrender to its liberal impulses. It tries to maintain a fig leaf of neutrality. But CNN can’t get through the day without betraying what it really thinks, often in underhanded ways. Thus, when CNN did a story on Chick-fil-A today, what did it focus on? The merits of the controversy? The fact that more than one Democratic government official has threatened to violate the company’s constitutional rights, because its CEO is opposed to gay marriage? No. In a dog whistle to its liberal audience, CNN focused on the fact that Todd and Sarah Palin, along with thousands of other Americans, tweeted photos of themselves eating at Chick-fil-A:

CNN introduced its segment with Pink’s “Stupid Girls,” a song which is obviously inappropriate for a cable news bumper, and evidently was intended as a comment on Palin’s support for Chick-fil-A. Here is the beginning of the CNN segment: [Click over to Power Line for photo and video — Ed]

Why is the fact that Chick-fil-A’s CEO opposes gay marriage newsworthy? At least half of all Americans oppose gay marriage. So what is the point? There is, indeed, a news story lurking here: public officials in at least two major cities, all of them Democrats, vowed to violate Chick-fil-A’s constitutional rights by denying them permits to operate in their cities because their CEO’s political views are not 100% congruent with those of the Democratic Party–as of today, that is; until two months ago, President Obama was opposed to gay marriage too.

So what does CNN say about the real scandal that is hiding here in plain sight? Nothing. This is it, as you can hear in the video: “Several communities now trying to block Chick-fil-A from coming into their cities.” As though that were completely normal, and constitutional; and as though “communities” were trying to do it, as opposed to two or three liberal Democrats.

Baby steps, John, baby steps. Hopefully the new head of CNN will drop his network’s passive-aggressive attempts at claiming “objectivity,” while shilling for Rev. Wright, baking cakes to celebrate Obama’s stillborn “stimulus” and doing on-air Obama fist bumps. Or, possibly beginning in January, being even more of an anti-Romney network than they are now. But the first step for their new boss will be to open admit CNN’s policies and politics on-air, both so that viewers can judge the channel’s ideology, and to bring its partisanship into the open, as with MSNBC, rather than its current pathetic fumbling one step forward, two-steps back efforts.