Actual CNN Caption: 'Putin Bullying Obama?'

Imagine you’re a backroom boffin in Vladimir Putin’s Russia assigned to monitor all of the news media out of the West that references Russia and your boss. Imagine the chuckle you know Putin’s going to get when you show him the following screen capture from CNN:

NEVER change, CNN. Don’t ever g**damn change –> pic.twitter.com/6FVL7SGgPm

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) March 1, 2014

“Well, that’s it,” Putin is surely thinking. “It’s hands off the Ukraine, now, lest anyone think that I would bully that nice Barry Obama fella! It’s a good thing Stalin isn’t still alive to see this. I know he’d be ever-so-shocked if he were accused of bullying anyone.”

For reasons known only to themselves, “bullying” is one of those words that burrowed itself deep into the collective psyche of those working at CNN, in much the same way that words such as “tolerance” and “diversity” were omnipresent amongst those on the left in 1990s. I’m not sure if “bullying” appears in Jonah Goldberg’s 2012 book The Tyranny of Cliches, but surely the etymology of how “bullying” and its “we’re all victims now” mindset became a popular trope among the left in recent years should be added to a later edition. CNN’s Anderson Cooper was particularly enamored of the word in 2011, running shows titled “The Roots of Bullying,” even as his fellow anchors such as Piers Morgan delighted in bullying their guests, hence the title of Ben Shapiro’s book last year on the topic.

It’s probably for the best though that CNN wasn’t around during World War II; we were spared the following Chyron graphic:

And while the American television networks were in their infancy during the early days of the Cold War, liberalism was made of much sterner stuff back then, which is why we never saw this graphic either:

As John Nolte writes, “NEVER change, CNN. Don’t ever g**damn change.” Personally though, I’d love to see CNN change, but that would require growing a spine — and a cranium capable of acquiring a set of morals atop it, which isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, as a once great TV network continues to auger further into the ground.