FLASHBACK: When Late Night TV Told an Inconvenient Truth
James O’Keefe is back, and that’s bad news for the mainstream media.
The conservative muckraker routinely shames reporters with undercover video stings. This time, he’s taking aim at CNN’s shoddy news product.
The #ExposeCNN series, part of O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group, shows station employees revealing the channel’s hard-wired bias. A casual CNN viewer sees its overt anti-Trump perspective. Hearing CNN staffers describe the behind-the-scenes thinking that produces it?
That’s another matter.
“There’s nothing we can do if Zucker wants impeachment every single day to be the top story…He wants impeachment…Above all else”#ExposeCNN
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 14, 2019
And, chances are, you won’t see any of this on the late night TV landscape. Today’s hosts dedicate their shows to impeaching President Donald Trump and, just as importantly, avoiding stories that make Democrats look bad.
And make no mistake. CNN is a Democrat house organ gussied up as a news outfit.
A few years ago a glimmer of bipartisanship sparkled on Comedy Central. O’Keefe shared a reminder of it during his presentation at the AmpFest 2019 conference in Miami last weekend.
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In 2009, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” gave political news a left-of-center rinse wash. Few did it better than Stewart at the time, and that description still applies. His Comedy Central perch leaned heavily to the Left, but he occasionally hit targets outside that comfort zone.
That was never more true than the time he covered O’Keefe’s historic ACORN sting. The community organizing group allowed O’Keefe and associate Hannah Giles, dressed as a pimp and prostitute, respectively, to reveal its shady tactics.
Today’s late night squad might avoid the sting entirely. ACORN’s ties to then-President Barack Obama were well known, making it radioactive to far-left comedians.
Stewart saw something he wanted to share, even if it clashed with his ideology. So he exposed it with all the comic might he could bring to the story. And he did it masterfully.
The best part? The comedian wags his finger at mainstream news reporters who got scooped by a skinny kid dressed in the most ridiculous “pimp” gear possible.
“Where the hell were you? You know who broke this story? These two!” Stewart cried in not-so-mock alarm. “They did it for $3,000. That’s [Wolf] Blitzer’s monthly beard wet-vac budget.”
“I’m a fake journalist, and I’m embarrassed these guys scooped me!”
O’Keefe is scooping his peers again, showing the journalistic rot under a channel that pretends to be a fair arbiter of the facts.
Stewart is gone from the late night circuit. If any show attempts to cover O’Keefe’s CNN story, here’s betting they’ll spin it to attack O’Keefe, Fox News or a combination of the two.
Stewart didn’t do that. He tried, though, almost in a self-aware manner. The video ends with Stewart poking fun at Fox News guest Michelle Malkin before realizing he didn’t have his facts straight.
She did.
That brand of honesty has all but vanished since Stewart left Comedy Central four years ago.