The former president of the United States gets his ear sliced by a 5.56mm bullet, while two bystanders are wounded and a third is killed. The initial CNN headline is: “Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally.”
“Falls.” Say what?
If you are going to get the attention of a primarily American audience, you might want to brush up on your network’s use of the vernacular.
As CNN’s first special assignments correspondent back in the 1980s, I thought the nightmare of the recent destruction of the network I helped build was finally over when Jeff “Mother” Zucker — a former NBC page and professional news operation imploder — got the boot for … er … MeToo reasons. (Who else would have intimate relations with a garden gnome?)
Then came the sacrificial goat Chris Licht, who laid down a bunt by firing alleged anchors Chris “Fredo” Cuomo, Don the Lemon, and Brian “Brownie” Stelter in hopes of improving the quality of the network.
Alas, no good deed goes unpunished, and Licht’s own staff mutinied in a feature published in the Atlantic. The staff did it with more whining than a herd of Karens at a pity party.
The puppet master behind it all — including Licht’s hiring and firing — was Warner Bros. Discovery’s bigfoot, a non-newsman named David Zaslav.
So, as CNN continued to descend earthward in an ever-tightening death spiral, did Zaslav look for a Ted Turner clone to regenerate the once-proud network? Did he seek advice from the last of CNN’s founding producers, Ted Kavanau? Nope.
Zaslav instead hired a BBC guy. You know, the Beeb, stiff upper lip and all: Sir Mark John Thompson, late of the New York Times. And this was the best his pitiful network could do: “Trump Injured at Incident at Rally.”
Yo, Markie baby! Your Sir-ship! Do your name and reputation mean anything to you? Did you put the entire CNN staff on Xanax?
The most ebullient politician since Theodore-Freaking-Roosevelt damn near gets his cranium vaporized by a supersonic bullet from a 20-year-old lunatic, and the best your people can do is call it an “incident”?
But there’s more. How about this caption? “Video Captures What Happened at Trump Rally That Left Him Injured.”
On what planet was that kind of low-ball pitch conceived? It’s delivered with all the passion of instructing “the help” when to pour the tea before the crumpets are served! If you are going to get the attention of a primarily American audience, you might want to brush up on your network’s use of the vernacular.
Finally, there is Jamie Gangel, a hand-me-down from NBC News and CNN’s answer to the Church Lady from “Saturday Night Live,” who decided on her own that a presidential candidate who nearly got whacked by an assassin’s bullet shouldn’t pump his fist in the direction of his attacker and holler, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
That, Sir Markie, is called the American spirit. Sir.
So, tell it to the king. And I won’t tell America you’re here to get even for Meghan Markle.
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