“Scandal and Controversy”: This Week Exposed the Rot Eating Away at CNN

If CNN were an average company dealing with average, non-famous employees, they would have had a very busy HR department. The pink slips would be flying like nobody’s business. Imagine your own place of work. Imagine if, in a single week, one of your co-workers was filmed threatening to throw someone down the stairs, another stood by while their bodyguard assaulted a journalist, and a third was sued for sexually harassing a man at a bar. This stuff just doesn’t happen every day, but at CNN, this all happened within the span of a week. Now the question is: Will CNN actually do anything about it?

No, of course not, because we’re not talking about pencil pushers in the accounting department; we’re talking about on-air talents Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, and April Ryan. And since all of these personalities dutifully carry the anti-Trump message to the country each and every evening, they are too valuable to be felled by their outlandish extracurricular activities.

Not that we quite understand their value, considering CNN’s place in the ratings.

“This was not a good week to be CNN. In addition to its abysmal ratings, three of its top news personalities are embroiled in scandal and controversy,” Cornell University Law School professor William A. Jacobson told Fox News. “In a rational world, CNN leadership would implement a dramatic course correction, but there is no sign that rationality prevails at CNN.”

That’s an understatement. The idea that it was “not a good week” is also.

This week, Don Lemon was accused in court of sexually assaulting a man at a Hamptons bar last summer. The details of what he did are too gross to repeat, but suffice it to say, it involved Lemon putting his hand down his own pants. Granted, you know, innocent until proven guilty and all of that, but let’s face it: Lemon didn’t exactly go out of his way to give Brett Kavanaugh that courtesy.

Then there was the exciting adventure of Chris Cuomo, who flipped his lid when a guy caught up to him at a nightclub and called him “Fredo.” Screaming at the man, threatening to beat him up and throw him down a flight of stairs, and insisting that “Fredo” was the equivalent of the “N-word” for Italians, Cuomo humiliated himself and gave the Trump campaign a new shirt to sell.

Finally, we have CNN contributor April Ryan who watched passively as her security violently removed a local news reporter from an event at which she was the keynote speaker. Ryan’s sins may not be as egregious as her co-workers’, but for all the flack she’s given the White House over the last two years about their treatment of journalists, it was a stunning moment of hypocrisy.

This is basically the CNN lineup, though. Put it together with Anderson Cooper expressing unrestrained glee about whites becoming a minority in America, and this is a network that has really put together a hell of a roster.