While CNN began with a reputation for being a liberal network, it has increasingly become the Conservative News Network since being sold by Ted Turner. While certainly not as far right as Fox, and preserving some degree of journalistic integrity, CNN has hired far more Republicans than others in the past several years. There is yet another addition–Erick Erickson of Red State.
Steve Benen finds this pick to be far worse than all the other conservatives which CNN has hired in recent years:
This is easily the worst decision CNN has ever made. That the network probably reviewed Erickson’s work before hiring him, and offered him a job anyway, suggests CNN’s professional standards for what constitutes “an important voice” have all but disappeared.
The point here isn’t that it’s disappointing to see CNN hire yet another conservative voice, adding to its already-large stable of conservative voices. To be sure, it’s frustrating, but it’s nothing new.
The problem here is with Erickson himself.
For example, it wasn’t long ago when Erickson explained his belief on why the left has a stronger online presence than the right. He attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives “have families because we don’t abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism.”
This is the same Erickson who recently called retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat f–king child molester,” referred to two sitting U.S. senators as “healthcare suicide bombers,” praised protesters for “tell[ing] Nancy Pelosi and the Congress to send Obama to a death panel” (he later backpedaled on that one), and described President Obama’s Nobel Prize as “an affirmative action quota.”
And perhaps my personal favorite was the time, just last year, when Erickson was angry about new environmental regulations relating to dishwasher detergent. He told his readers, “At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?”
There was a point when major professional outlets would look at a voice like this as an “extremist,” to be shut out of the mainstream of America’s civil discourse. CNN, however, considers this record of radical rhetoric, and concludes it should pay him to offer on-air political commentary.
CNN will no doubt hear about blog posts like this one, and assume that liberals are angry because the network hired a right-wing blogger. But that’s not it — there are thoughtful, intelligent conservative bloggers in the country, who occasionally have insightful things to say. The problem here is that Erick Erickson isn’t one of them.
