The unexpected resignation this week of CNN president Jeff Zucker over an undisclosed relationship with a fellow employee could soon be followed by the departure of several staffers who had helped him turn CNN into the “cancel news network.”
Under Zucker’s tenure, CNN not only reported from a partisan Democratic Party view, but actively sought to shut down rival news outlets and content creators, cloaking its efforts in the noble garb of supposed fights against “disinformation.”
In 2018, CNN helped lead efforts to remove controversial commentator Alex Jones and his Infowars outlet from social media platforms. While some of Jones’s critics rejoiced, his ejection marked the beginning of an era of social media censorship.
CNN remained on the front lines, urging the suppression of those with whom Zucker’s network disagreed. Brian Stelter, who turned the name Reliable Sources into a cruel irony, worked with reporter Oliver Darcy and others to do the dirty work.
Shortly after Infowars was deplatformed, Darcy appeared on Stelter’s show to suggest that President Donald Trump should be kicked off Twitter — a suggestion that came to fruition, months later, when Twitter banned the president from the site.
Darcy also went after mainstream competitors like Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist, complaining that Fox News host Bret Baier allowed her to appear on his news show to present her point of view “unchallenged” (on a panel discussion).
Stelter had a particular obsession with Fox News, blaming it for supposedly minimizing the danger of the coronavirus pandemic.
CNN also hosted the first interview with volunteer censor Mark Rivitz, who created a group called “Sleeping Giants” to urge a boycott of Breitbart News. (Ironically, the effort hurt other news outlets, once advertisers learned to blacklist keywords.)
And CNN also threatened to publish the name of an obscure Reddit user, who had created a meme of then-President Trump wrestling an opponent with CNN’s logo for a head, unless he apologized, a threat that was likened to blackmail or extortion.
Throughout this effort, CNN claimed that it was merely reporting, not actively trying to censor its critics or silence rival outlets, but merely asking questions as any journalist might.
But as Breitbart News noted in 2020: “CNN’s ‘reporting’ method in such cases appears to consist of raising complaints with social media organizations and asking them why they have not acted, until they do. It is less aimed at eliciting information than producing an outcome.”
Later in the 2020 election, Stelter cheered the media’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it “disinformation” and “last season’s episode,” though it was based on uncontested physical evidence, and was later confirmed through reporting by a variety of news outlets.
In a panel discussion with the BBC, Stelter said that social media companies needed to do even more to suppress such supposed misinformation: “Honestly, they’re not even doing one-tenth of what they should be doing.”
When it came to suppressing news, Stelter led by example. In the hours before Radar Online first published a story about Zucker’s relationship with a colleague — which was supposedly the worst-kept secret in the establishment media — Stelter used his newsletter to smear the outlet as “nutty” and “garbage.”
He then professed shock and surprise Wednesday when Zucker admitted that the allegations were true. CNN’s media reporter had suppressed the biggest story in the U.S. media.
With Zucker gone, the crew that CNN used to attack “misinformation” and silence rival outlets is suddenly vulnerable. The few serious journalists left at CNN know that they are tarnished by association with these bullies.
Zucker, Stelter, Darcy, and others took “cancel culture,” once the preserve of left-wing universities, and “normalized” it for political, political, and pecuniary gain.
Like Robsepierre, they now face the fate to which they condemned others. Perhaps the Terror is ending.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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