CNN thrived on bigger and better lies, but was killed in the end by the simple truth.

Posted by Pointman on June 30, 2017 · 15 Comments 

We all live in various groupings or cultures. It’s a universal that’s nearly in our DNA because it’s both safer and we directly benefit from the knowledge and skills that are inevitably shared. These manifest goodies meant we’ve been selected for an almost reflexive compulsion to cooperate with others by aggregating into not only a group, but several.

We’re nearly all a part of an immediate and an extended family where a direct blood relationship exists. Beyond that standard grouping, most men for instance have a set of men friends they’ll meet with on a regular basis, and likewise women have their own circle of personal female friends.

There are other, bigger groupings we all belong to, sometimes whether we voted in or not. Country, race, language, religion, colour and politics, to name but a few. These are all of course groupings with different imperatives or perhaps objectives, but they all within a group tend to share a common ethos with which it perceives and reacts to the world around it.

At this point, I’d like to agree vocabulary, or excuse my abuse of it in this particular instance. Strictly speaking, ethos means the spirit or standard of behaviour a group holds itself to and nothing more, but I’d like to extend its meaning to include logos, which means reasoning.

Rolling the two into one is an alternative to using such fudgy and inaccurate terms as gestalt, group mind or even worse hive mind, which are pretty ghastly since they reduce us to the sentient level of programmed ants, something humans can never be since even the lesser children of God amongst us have this unique intangible called consciousness possessed by no other creature on the face of the Earth.

In a bloodless Darwinian sense, these groupings add to our ability to survive in what can at times be a hostile world, but the survival of the group also keeps alive the ethos which propels it, a bit akin to Dawkin’s selfish gene, but in a more realistic fashion. I’m by no means a fan of that particular theory by the way. It smacks too much of an itemising accounts clerk on an abacus furiously bending calculus to work on sliding beads. Like a Ukrainian tractor, it somehow lurches along but is at best a patchwork beast that lacks any elegance.

It’s always too tempting to apply Darwin’s theory in places it has no business and this has been done tragically all too often and with terrible consequences to humanity, but I will push on with the simile cognisant of the perilous ground I’m treading on.

These groupings work well to the benefit of their members, just as long as the ethos that powers it evolves with circumstances. Think of the grouping as a species of some kind and the circumstances the ecological niche it inhabits, with the ethos being the hardwired behaviour that enables it to thrive in that niche. Nothing last forever, as we all know, so change will always come in some form or another.

It’s the extent to which a species can reprogram its behaviour in the face of a changing habitat that will decide its survival and nothing else, which is exactly why no species above the simple cellular has survived since anything arguably called complex life began on earth a billion years or so back in the deep downwhen.

We have the most reprogrammable ethos of any species which has ever existed, which is why combined with our compulsive urge to aggregate has allowed us to uniquely colonise every corner of the Earth. But also as humans, we have a unique third advantage – if the group we’re in is failing, we can leave it because we’ve got other groups we can flee to.

The original grouping will die, but perhaps one or two refugees from it still carrying with them their ancient Denisovan genes will barter their way into other more nimble groupings which are already evolving to fit themselves into the changing niche the old grouping simply couldn’t adapt itself to. Think of it as hybridisation or speciation, which is actually quite rare, since it’s a spin-off a whole new species. Extinction is the usual rule.

There’s about 4% Neanderthal in each and every one of us and there’s roughly 26% in total paddling about in our gene pool in the company of other ancient hominids. Mister DNA, he don’t lie – we didn’t wipe them out with our superior genes, we just got it on with them, as Barry White would say.

You’ve sat patiently through the mandatory religious lecture in the revival hall, so now you can have the soup. Expressed differently, you’ve had the theory, now you get the praxis, though it’s always worth bearing in mind that while theory dictates it’s impossible for a man to fly, everyone knows Superman can.

The mainstream media is dying.

It’s a grouping that worked in various forms and incarnations since Caxton, but in the last decade it lost its way totally. The ethos has become exclusively inward looking and self-congratulatory, though it thinks it has its finger on the pulse of its consumer’s needs. The mass market customer of its product looks at it as irrelevant white noise, an annoying bunch of immaculately groomed, dentitionally perfect, jabbering idiots who live in some delusional off-planet utopia far removed from being poor, not a special case, and ignored.

In return, the media looks down at them as Morlocks it’s their duty to guide to what semblance of light they might be capable of understanding. Their relationship mostly comes down to condescension on one side and inured indifference on the other. That all worked until the Morlocks started getting terminally pissed off at the whole situation about three years ago. It was that or revolution, and a year later all the electoral upsets started rolling in. Brexit, Trump and others with more to come.

You really ain’t seen nuttin yet.

Like it or not, the niche that the grouping we call the MSM lived in has changed, and radically, but the ethos of the MSM is by now hardwired – it simply can’t evolve to survive in a habitat which no longer exists. Too much of their programming has been done with a soldering iron. It’s really too hardwired by now.

CNN is the example I’ll use because it’s leading the way, but the rest of the media icons are all sliding along that same Hertzsprung-Russell main line sequence to flare out into extinction, with just a time lag behind CNN. Let’s do the itemised death rattle.

One of their presenters of the New Year’s gig does a photo shoot of her looking like Skeletor’s wife holding up Trump’s severed head and they’re so taken aback by a ferocious reaction from Mr & Mrs average America, the fire her the next day in panic.

Surely all of the Morlocks share their pathological hatred of Trump? They simply don’t learn from that short sharp foreshock, because the ethos inside the CNN grouping is that the whole of America hates Trump as badly as they do, so against him anything goes, anything can be said.

Anything else would be and is unthinkable inside the structure of their ethos.

Within days, another of their presenters, Reza Aslan, a supposed religious scholar presenting a show for them, goes on a rant about the president the highlights of which were he was a “piece of shit” and an “embarrassment to humankind”. He eventually gets his show pulled, but nobody thinks of the two of them as other than blips rather than a deep systemic and cultural (read ethos) problem which needs to be quickly addressed or the channel is fucked.

No red rockets go up into the night sky, there’s no panic in Detroit, nobody is popping smoke for an emergency evac. Not just yet. It was thought, just make the cut, get rid of them, slap some red hot iron over the wound to cauterise it, and the situation will get back to normal. Throw a couple of expendables overboard, the ship will self-stabilise.

In the background, a couple of channel smashing tactical nukes were already airborne and had already wormed their way unnoticed through the arrogant we’re CNN and nobody fucks with us defense while we’re staging a news piece. They were filmed by that most innocent of devices, a mobile phone, while stage managing a protest by some token Muslims against the latest London terrorist attack. Muslims? I should say actors and six or seven tops, but who cares as long as you do close up narrow shots.

It was disgusting.

The bodies of the victims were barely cold and there they were printing out placards for the “protesters” and laying out flowers at their feet while suitably Asian police were found to stand momentarily either side of them, just in shot. They did a grubby denial that it was a fake thing that wasn’t exactly what it looked like until two days later other mobile footage showed them minutes earlier assembling the players.

Fake news being manufactured in a business like way over the dead bodies of real people not yet in their graves just to fill a news slot with a punchy sixty seconds. Never mind media, in terms of basic human decency it doesn’t get much lower than that.

Scum.

By this terminal stage in their credibility free fall, you’d have to be a gullible seven-year old to believe anything they reported, but confident in the short term memory and idiocy of their great viewing public they ran exclusives like the Clinton bought man Comey was going to drop Trump in the shit in his testimony to Congress and they had this guaranteed bombshell on the authority from yet another of their anonymous hush-hush sources.

Before the news cycle had even sludgingly constipated its way to an end of day, Comey’s actually testimony totally contradicted that story which carried several bylines against it, thereby ensuring it therefore must be true.

Never to be knocked back by mere reality, they quickly came up with yet another anonymously sourced bombshell about one of Trump’s associates being somehow fiendishly connected to the Russians and some sort of complex fund. It was such complete and utter rubbish that the Russians themselves in complete exasperation took the unusual step of going totally transparent to prove it was a load of elderly male genitalia, which is to say a load of old bollocks.

CNN did the mannish thing for a while of cringing in silence and hoping it’d all go away, but then the three masterminds behind the scoop all suddenly decided to resign in unison.

It appeared very noble of them really to fall on their sword until you learn the victim of the reputationally damaging story had threatened CNN with a $100M damages suit unless they retracted, settled quietly and they threw all the people with their name against the story to the dogs. It was the full publishing disaster by complete bumbling amateurs. Advertise it, pimp it up beforehand, publish it finally, stunned silence, you really wanna run a story like that without a single named source?

The sad and shabby aftermath was retraction, deletion and settle up quietly, like a dirty old man in a stained mackintosh caught out doing something disgusting at the back of the cinema. It was almost as if someone had walked them over a cliff.

By this stage, they’ve survived dragging their cross through the jeering crowds of the town and all the way up the slopes of Calvary but at the top of it awaited the final agony – Project Veritas with a mouthful of nails and an iron mallet to nail them to the cross of their betrayal of their viewers. A baying crowd awaited and cheered as each nail was hammered in. They might like to think of themselves as Jesus, but the crowd saw them for what they actually were – the dishonest thief.

It’s real investigative reporting for a change, no more anonymous or perhaps invented sources, it’s senior CNN staffers all filmed saying what they really think when they don’t realise they were on camera. They are now the sources themselves, and there’s nowhere to hide from their own words.

A random selection of quotes from them over the Russia Trump story they’ve been running for nearly a year. “It’s bullshit”, “It’s a witch hunt”, “It’s a nothing burger”, American voters – “thick as shit”. I won’t go on but the camera vérité revelations will, since Project Veritas is still rolling out each scoop on a daily basis, with the next one due tomorrow. One nail will follow another.

You do have to make your choice on the destruction of CNN and why it’s justified. Was it because they manufactured fake news? Misrepresented what people told them? Made it ordinary and legitimate to lie to their viewers? Or was it as all the staffers said, just to chase ratings because bashing Trump by any means fair or foul pumped those ratings up?

Or maybe, just maybe if you believe in the value of that thing of going into a poll booth every four years and voting for who should lead your country, the company was engaged in an act of treason against the very fibre of that country’s democratic structure, merely to stroke their own ego and at the same time build up their bank account.

The simple truth is they were liars who got found out.

©Pointman

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