The next time CNN tries to pull this stunt, don’t play along by watching. Turn the channel again.
Congratulations, America!
CNN tried to re-create its 2015-2016 game plan of giving Donald Trump as much free airtime as possible, airing his hate rallies live, with little to no fact-checking or commentary, which some say helped land him in the White House.
Some, like The Huffington Post, initially refused to cover The Donald as a serious candidate when he announced. HuffPo ran their Trump coverage in the Entertainment section for six months, until December of 2015 when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic called Trump “an actual threat to national security.”
CNN this year is treating Howard Schultz like a serious candidate – even though he hasn’t even announced.
Howard Schultz has repeatedly refused to give actual answers to actual questions, said he won’t respond to hypotheticals, and has attacked the Democratic Party and liberal positions – all while pretending he’s not a candidate for office.
Schultz was gifted with an hour-long CNN Town Hall Tuesday night. Possibly the biggest news to come from it wasn’t his imbecilic remarks about gun control, but the fact that (pretty much) no one watched.
CNN’s Howard Schultz Show “finished third in the cable news ratings race, according to early numbers from Nielsen Media Research,” The Hill reports. “Both Fox News and MSNBC drew more viewers.”
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was only too happy to gloat about Schultz’s Folly.
“If you think Howard Schultz gets too much TV attention, please note Cory Booker got about 2 million more viewers with Rachel Maddow last night than Schultz got on CNN,” O’Donnell said on Twitter. “And I beat Schultz in the same time slot without a presidential candidate with 1.2 million more viewers.”
The question now becomes, did CNN learn its lesson, or will it try its hand once more at shaping a presidential race by using its tremendous resources to create a candidate out of almost nothing?
The next time CNN tries to pull this stunt, don’t play along by watching. Turn the channel.