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CNN's Squatters, Nazi-Hunting Punters, and Transphobic Wildfires Rule the Day

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Feb 21, 2025
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Demo-lition Project – CBS NIGHTLY NEWS

  • Nothing like refusing to build an audience.

It has been barely three weeks since the revamped “CBS Evening News” kicked off its new format following the exit of Norah O’Donnell, with new co-hosts John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. The idea was to bring in a producer from “60 Minutes” in order to create more of a long-form news format. (This is a dicey move, given the recent problems with the Sunday news magazine.)

Well, already they are looking to change things on the failing show:

The ratings have experienced a consistent decline, according to Nielsen data. While the show debuted with 5.2 million total viewers, it slid to 4.8 million viewers on average its first week on air. By its second week, the show lost roughly 300,000 viewers and by its third week ended Feb. 16, it garnered just under 4.5 million total viewers, the data showed.

Matching Media Memorandum – VARIOUS OUTLETS

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  • Not all NFL kickers’ opinions are created equally.

There was a really daft news report this week when it was reported that a one-time punter from the Minnesota Vikings was arrested at a town hall meeting when he was protesting a library putting up a sign that listed attributes which ended up spelling out MAGA.

Chris Kluwe was arguing this was unacceptable because (hope you are sitting down), in his stern opinion (seriously – gird yourself for this revelation) – he considers Trump and MAGA followers to be…NAZIS!

This tiresome argument is so played out it does not even register in the ears of most people anymore, with one group being the exception – news show bookers.

Kluwe made the rounds on the news nets, repeating his impotent message that Trump is Hitler, and so forth.

The real amusement in all of this is last year the press was indignant and told us to ignore the words of Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs, dismissing him as only a kicker, so why listen? Yet Butker had spoken at a college commencement and was not begging for media attention, yet when Kluwe spews impotent talking points long rendered useless, the press trots him out like some savant.

Pre-Written Field Reports – NBC NEWS

  • After getting scorched on this weeks ago, he has not gotten better on the topic.

It was a choice piece of a sound bite when Karoline Leavitt, during her first White House Press Room briefing, countered NBC News fixture Peter Alexander trying to pin her down on where spending cuts were affecting people, and when she asked for an example, he could not name any. So she noted the problem with his approach by pointing out he was expecting her to answer to a hypothetical regarding an agency he could not name.

Well, Pete has not gotten any better. At an outdoor press meeting, he kept berating Leavitt with questions about spending cuts, and without citing specific examples of irresponsible efforts kept challenging her, until she asked the proper question: Why is the media so against cutting waste, fraud, and abuse?

Reporting on the Mirror – CNN

  • Proud of this, are you?

CNN is attempting to gin up a measure of sympathy over the fact it has been evicted from its usual quarters inside The Pentagon, making way for other news outlets to have their turn working inside the facility.

As an exit strategy, CNN producer Barbara Starr shared a picture of its media hovel, cleared out of equipment and stripped bare, resembling a health department violation on par with a college freshman’s dorm room at the end of a semester.

Hardest Hitting News – ABC NEWS

  • Sounds like those wildfires were transphobic.

Today, we roll out a new category, covering the practice in the press of reporting on some form of negative news and then pointing out how some marginalized group(s) is/are affected worse than…we aren’t sure, the “privileged”?

Our favorite example to date was how a sodium cloud rising from The Great Salt Lake was taken aloft and was apparently racist in the way it split off to adversely affect both Hispanics and Pacific Islanders.

In this new example, the wildfires in Los Angeles are said to have been particularly bad for certain people, but not others, we assume, as the transgender and non-binary citizens were “hardest hit.”