RUSH: CNN failed to disclose that a question — they had a town hall last week. Remember when I was confused over what was the debate and the town hall? They had a town hall last week. An LGBTQ town hall, like the second one of these things. And they stacked another audience member just like Donna Brazile was sending Hillary the questions at these things back in 2016. So, it makes all the sense in the world for Fox to hire Donna Brazile, right?
“Elizabeth Warren’s zinger at an LGBT town hall may have gone viral, but CNN failed to disclose that the questioner donated the federal maximum to her,” campaign in 2018. “CNN’s [Fredo] Cuomo introduced Morgan Cox at the Thursday town hall as ‘the chair of the Human Rights Campaign board of directors’ who was part of ‘a real estate investment firm in Dallas.’”
He’s a donor to Fauxcahontas! Handing her a setup in advance arranged question that she knocks out of the park and then the video of it goes viral! CNN participated in this, which takes me to page two of O’Keefe’s Project Veritas expose on CNN. Now, this to me is fascinating. James O’Keefe found a whistleblower inside CNN, willing to wear a wire, hidden camera, hidden microphone, and to record editor meetings, executive suite conversations and what have you.
The data was collated by O’Keefe at Project Veritas, and he has released it in two stages yesterday and today. And in the normal ebb and flow of things, I think it’s huge news. But you know what I’m getting from people? “Hey, Rush, we already know CNN’s corrupt. This is not a surprise to any of us that CNN has a political agenda.”
And this is exactly what Moynihan meant when he came up with the term “defining deviancy down.” When a society no longer can enforce the law on certain crimes, when it seems like everybody’s doing it, we just stop calling it crime and instead we start calling it normal. And therefore aberrant, deviant behavior becomes normalized.
The same thing’s happening here. This ought to outrage people because CNN holds themselves out as the exact opposite of what they are. CNN portrays themselves as the essence of journalism. They don’t pick favorites. They don’t have sides. They’re simply out there doing the news. They’re doing journalism. They’re reporting events. There is no agenda. There is no narrative.
This is what CNN says. Whenever you corner anybody there about their bias or about their agenda, their narratives, they deny it and they accuse you of being some kind of conspiracy theorist. So here comes O’Keefe and he’s got the goods on ’em, and a lot of people think, “Well, no big deal, Rush, we already knew it.”
I think it is a big deal because CNN is just a microcosm of all the rest of them. And even if people know it, even if there is this now commonly accepted observation that CNN’s not news, I think it’s still worth noting. So I want to play a couple of sound bites from the treasure trove of hidden audio and video that O’Keefe and Project Veritas and his whistleblower accrued.
The first one would be at 9:30. You’d have the anchor, the managing editor and a whole bunch of other people, and they would sit in the room and they would talk to reporters out across the world and they would determine what was going to be on the nightly news that night. And they would argue and cajole and so forth. The managing editor had final call, in many cases it was the anchor, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings.
And then they do it again at 3:30. And in these meetings is when they would discuss the importance of various stories, which reporters had what, which reports were worth putting on the air, which reporters were not worth putting on the air, which stories they wanted to focus on. And nothing untoward about any of this. I mean, they do this as newspapers, too, except in these instances we’re talking about a 22 minute program, a half hour newscast with 18 minutes of commercials, 42 minutes of content. But you would hear how they were making valuations on the worth of stories and so forth.
But in this, in these calls what you hear is advocacy for a candidate, advocacy for an issue, instructions to hit a candidate, the exact kind of stuff they all deny that they do. So here is the 9 a.m. — this is the rundown. Now, they’re not putting together a 6:30 newscast here. They’re planning their news coverage for the day and they’re prioritizing things. What we have here, we have Jeff Zucker, who is the CEO, the president of CNN and the political director, David Chalian, who also appears on camera.
ZUCKER: David, are we taking Andrew Yang seriously enough?
CHALIAN: I mean, he’s like number six in the polls and he’s just raised 10 million dollars, so I take him as seriously as that may. He’s clearly sparked interest. Do I think he’s a likely nominee? No, I don’t.
ZUCKER: Should we be taking him more seriously?
CHALIAN: Yeah, I mean, I think we, I don’t know why we wouldn’t take, you know, most of these candidates seriously. We should be, we should definitely be looking at why Andrew Yang is resonating.
RUSH: No big deal here, but he wasn’t resonating. Andrew Yang’s resonating ’cause he’s promising to give everybody a thousand dollars. He’s not resonating. He’s Santa Claus. By the way, he is a tech billionaire who I’m telling you doesn’t know what he thinks he knows. He’s a product of a very corrupt education system. He’s an intelligent guy, don’t misunderstand. He’s capable of learning whatever he’s taught. But he’s just been fed a bunch of gibberish all his life, like most people his age have.
So to him, you know, communist China, hey, really misunderstood, same thing with Venezuela, America’s the place with problems, America’s falling, America’s failing in its promise to humanity, none of these other places. America’s destroying the world with climate change, America’s the problem in the world. I mean, that’s essentially what these people have been taught. So are we taking Yang seriously? Here’s Zucker, and this is also on I think a 9 a.m. call.
ZUCKER: I also think we should be doing a segment somewhere on what Kamala Harris raised last night on AC 360, and that others are talking about. It’s not going to happen, but I think it’s a really good segment in a show: “Should Trump’s Twitter Account Be Suspended?” It’s obviously what Kamala Harris is praying, others are talking about it. Not gonna happen, but it’s a good talk – it’s a good segment.
So Kamala Harris wants Trump’s Twitter account suspended, Jeff Zucker, that’s a great idea, let’s run with it. So they turn Kamala Harris into a news maker simply because she’s got this forlorn idea of somehow limiting Trump’s access to free speech. Even though they know it isn’t gonna happen, they’re gonna join the fray.
BREAK TRANCSRIPT
RUSH: So we got a new tweet from James O’Keefe, and he’s sharing with us an excerpt from one of the videos. It’s a couple of CNN people. One is media coordinator Christian Sierra and the other is media coordinator Nick Neville at CNN. They’re talking to each other, and they’re asking (summarized exchange), “Why don’t we televise a Warren rally? Why don’t we televise a Biden rally?” One asks the other. (laughing) “It’s a snooze fest. Both of would be boring as hell!” CNN acknowledging that televising a Democrat rally would be an instant loser. See, they know. They know — and I guarantee you that that irritates the hell out of them that Trump’s rallies are so energetic and charismatic. It irritates the heck out of ’em! It’s just another reason why they hate Trump.
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