Slate nails it "Firing Jeffrey Lord Doesnt Fix CNNs Jeffrey Lord Problem"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/firing_jeffrey_lord_doesn_t_fix_cnn_s_jeffrey_lord_problem.html

He was only the most obnoxious embodiment of false balance at the network.

By Justin Peters

Jeffrey Lord is a political hack and shameless troll who spent the past two years wasting America’s time on CNN as one of the world’s dumbest and most slavishly pro-Trump pundits. He appeared regularly on CNN’s political programming as one of Donald Trump’s chief water-bearers, playing the part so well that Anderson Cooper once felt compelled to note—on air!—that Trump could defecate on his desk and Lord would defend it. Cooper’s crude observation was wholly accurate: Lord’s only qualifications for being on television were his readiness to applaud even Trump’s most noxious moments and the fact that he already owned a suit.


CNN fired Lord on Thursday, after a dumb and trollish Twitter feud culminated with Lord tweeting “Sieg Heil!” at the president of Media Matters. The incident was completely in character for Lord, who is the human equivalent of one of those “peeing Calvin” stickers—over the course of his CNN tenure, he seconded Trump’s pre-election warnings of a potentially “stolen” election, called the KKK “a leftist terrorist organization,” suggested that the Gold Star family Trump insulted on the campaign trail was asking for it, and told Ana Navarro that “I don’t think you’re a Latino”—as well as for CNN, which is happy to have its personalities indirectly champion the president’s vacuous pseudo-fascism on air just as long as they refrain from saying “Sieg Heil” on Twitter.

Lord will not be missed, either by viewers or by the network itself, which will inevitably find some other disingenuous lickspittle to fill Lord’s seat on its panel shows. Even so, this was a pretty dumb reason to fire Lord. He wasn’t saluting Hitler; he was calling the Media Matters guy a Nazi. It was, generously, a bad joke. The only thing dumber than how Lord left the network, in fact, is how he got there in the first place.

The only thing dumber than how Lord left the network is how he got there in the first place.
As the New York Times reported in April, Lord first came to CNN’s attention in 2015, when the network was having trouble finding anyone—literally anyone—who would defend Trump’s then–long shot candidacy on TV. At that point, Trump’s bilious rhetoric hadn’t been validated by any primary wins, and no credible person was willing to risk his or her reputation to support a polarizing bigot with no evident path to victory.

snip - read it all at the link - it is spot on and worth it.