Letter to Jonathan Klein, new president of CNN

I wrote this letter to Jonathan Klein, the new president of CNN, as a result of this thread (CNN's New Boss: Progressives "Don't Get Too Worked up About Anything") on DU:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1389695

You may want to look at the source information here too:
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0412-11.htm



Jonathan Klein
President, CNN
P.O. Box 105366
One CNN Center
Atlanta, Georgia 30348

Dear Mr. Klein:

I understand that you recently told Charlie Rose that progressives “don't get too worked up about anything. And they're pretty morally relativistic.” Well, I got your worked up progressive right here. I’m worked up, riled up, fed up, and sick and tired of being put down dishonestly.

But why would you care what I think? I used to be a dedicated, loyal viewer of CNN. I considered CNN the gold standard in television news. Once when I moved to a new town where CNN Headline News was on the cable system, and it hadn’t been on the system where I did live, I actually pumped my fist in the air and exclaimed, “Yes!” with pleasure. Now, I haven’t watched CNN for so long that I don’t remember what channel you’re on. When CNN abandoned responsible journalism, I abandoned CNN. As far as I’m concerned, CNN might as well stand for “Corporatist Neocon Newsaganda.”

I quit watching CNN (and all the other so-called mainstream media) because you’re dishonest, unfair, and biased; because of your partisan bad judgment of what is news and isn’t news; and because of your abdication of journalistic responsibility; all of which I will explain further. (Now, and in most of the rest of this letter, when I say “you,” I mean you, the media cartel, not you personally, Jonathan Klein.) Responsible journalists speak truth to power; all of you in the “mainstream media” speak “Yes, Master!” to power, as long as the power is neocon Republican. You all decided to try to be more Faux than Faux, more Foney than Foney.

Do you know what we call you instead of “mainstream media?” The corporate media cartel, the downstream media (because you just take whatever rightwing talking points get dumped into your flow of information, and you pass it on), the poodle press (Rovian lapdogs), the lamestream press, media whores and presstitutes, 6-headed Pravda (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSRNC, Faux/Foney), Ministry of Propaganda, GOPPravda, Goebbels’s wet dream... Those are some of the polite names. You probably don’t want to hear the impolite names.

Let me tell you about the reasons I no longer watch CNN or the rest of the cartel.

Dishonest, unfair, and biased.

Let’s face it. There is no such thing as a Teflon president. There are only protected presidents. Protected by news directors and executives who refuse to follow a story. Clinton’s blowjobs never hurt anyone; Bush’s lies have cost over 100,000 lives (yes, some people count foreigners as human), hundreds of billions of dollars (so far), and all remnants of international respect for the U.S. Do the lies not “stick,” or do you just not report on the lies? We just recently had yet another “smoking gun” memo, this time from Britain, but did you cover it, beyond a tiny mention in passing? Clinton’s blowjobs, which didn’t harm anyone and cost only the $80 million they spent to investigate them, were story number one every day for over six months (with one break for a tornado and one for a hurricane). Reagan was no Teflon president and Bush is no Teflon president; they were and are protected by the Ministry of Propaganda.

The recent exchange on CNN about who’s a good Catholic between Wolf Blitzer, Paul Begala, and Robert Novak after the pope’s death perfectly illustrates the dishonesty, unfairness, and bias. (I don’t watch, but someone pointed out a video clip on the internet.) If you don’t agree with the pope when the pope agrees with the wingnuts, then you’re not a good Catholic; if you don’t agree with the pope when the pope disagrees with the wingnuts, ah, then you’re still a good Catholic. A good Catholic and a good Christian agrees with the wingnuts, and the pope’s opinion is only relevant if he agrees with the wingnuts. And that streaming line that Begala mentioned, “Many church doctrines are conservative.” As he said, many are also liberal. Has anyone at CNN been disciplined for that blatant display of bias? Yeah, I thought so.

The whole moral values thing is a crock. Many of the people who voted against Bush did so precisely because of moral values, but you insist on calling the hate-mongering. lying, war-mongering, corruption-laden, torture-loving, doctor-murdering, clinic-bombing crowd as the “moral values” crowd. WWJD? Anyone with half a brain and a shred of integrity would ask, What DID Jesus do? But you and your neocon masters know the answer to that question and don’t like the answer—he refused to go to war, he blessed the peacemakers, he healed the sick and cared for the poor, and he refused to judge and condemn. That’s all anathema to the neocon agenda, so you call those who actually follow Jesus’s teachings “morally relativistic” and you call the immoral, anti-Christian, hate-filled monsters who reject everything that Jesus stood for the “moral values” crowd.

And double standards. I could go on for days about double standards, but I won’t. I’ll just mention a couple. You say progressives don’t get worked up about anything. But whenever we do, you call us angry, bitter partisans, and strident. Oh, how you love that word “strident.” But only to apply to liberals. When knuckle-dragging Neanderthals think a liquefied brain is conscious and they justify or even outright advocate murdering judges, doctors, and gays, you never call them angry or strident. When we get angry, you won’t even talk about what we’re angry about; you’ll only talk about us being angry and call us strident or crazy. When know-nothing, anti-science idiots scream that a liquefied brain is trying to speak, you won’t call them crazy or strident, and you pretend that their uninformed opinions are as valid and newsworthy as the opinions of the medical doctors who examined the CAT scans.

The “Dean scream.” Distortion so great as to be tantamount to a lie, and repeated endlessly in the distorted, dishonest, unfair, and biased form. Have you ever shown the realistic, undistorted form of that?

Partisan judgment of what’s news.

I already mentioned Clinton’s lies and Bush’s lies. There is no way in the world to justify the relative amounts of coverage the media cartel gave and gives them. Matters of state, public importance, thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars (and trillions before it’s done, likely) vs. private peccadilloes that are nobody’s business. And now Henry Hyde even admits that it was all about retaliation. How much did you report that? Can you really claim that Clinton’s blowjobs deserved hundreds of times as much coverage as the WMD lies, the lies about seeking a peaceful solution (that we now know were lies because the British still have an independent press), and the ever-shifting justifications for war? You never call them on any of it. Just as you never call them on the 300 tons of missing explosives or the missing $8 billion. Does anyone from CNN ever ask them how the investigation of who forged the Niger uranium document is going, or if there even is an investigation?

Dan Rather made a mistake in accepting an apparently bogus supporting document, and even though he had the actual story right, all of you in the cartel pounced all over him and got him driven out. O’Reilly and Hume outright lie regularly, and no one ever says a word about it. There could be a 24-hour news channel that does nothing but report on the lies of Foney News, but no one other than Al Franken ever mentions a single one. In any other competitive business, if one competitor regularly lied, the other competitors would be all over it. But in the newsaganda business, the only competition is to see who can say “Yes, Master!” to the neocons most prostrately and who can get the same celebrity gossip at the same time.

How often does anyone ask Bush how the investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame is going? And back to the subject of double standards for a moment: Why is that treasonous bastard SOB POS Robert Novak still on CNN? If a liberal outed an American spy during war, they would be gone faster than you can say Peter Arnett. Not a day would pass without the media cartel reporting every leak and whisper about the investigation, without wingnut Congressmen ranting about treason, or without Fristian preachers railing against traitors. But you just say, “Yes, Master!” to your neocon masters and keep him on.

Oh, how you distort what’s worth covering and what’s not. A dozen Schiavo protestors who don’t know the difference between a cerebral cortex and a bowl of fluid get 24/7 coverage, but hundreds of thousands, even a million, protestors against a neocon war don’t get even a mention.

Abdication of journalistic responsibility, or speaking “Yes, Master!” to power.

Of the Swift Boat Liars who claimed they served with Kerry, only one actually served with Kerry. Apparently he was in the water being shot at by enemies and rescued by crewmates while “nothing happened” on that day in Viet Nam. Have any of you ever asked him if he gave back his medals because “nothing happened” that day or if he has tried to get his service record corrected to show that nothing happened? Have any of you ever asked the others why they say they served with Kerry when none of them did and none of them even knew him then? I didn’t think so.

Have any of you ever asked Bush why he appoints so many convicted felons to high office? (John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, and who knows how many more.) Why is the law and order crowd so fond of felons? Has any president ever appointed as many criminals as Bush, and how many has he appointed? I didn’t think you’d know. Or care. After all, Clinton got a blowjob, it was the greatest and most reported crime of a decade, and that trumps everything else.

Have any of you ever told the American people that our votes are counted by computers programmed by convicted felon hackers, with multiple felony convictions for fraud by computer software? Have you reported that the Ukrainian election was known to be fraudulent because the results differed so much from the exit polls, but our own exit polls were even more different from the supposed actual results? Have you mentioned that Mitofsky explained the error with an assumption for which he gave absolutely no evidence and that the evidence he had suggested just the opposite of his conclusion? Have you mentioned that our exit polls were inaccurate only where the votes were counted by computers owned and programmed by highly partisan companies, where the vote counting is unauditable and unverifiable; and that wherever the vote was verifiable, the exit polls were accurate? No, I didn’t think so. After all, Clinton got a blowjob, the greatest and most reported crime of the century, and that trumps everything else.

Have any of you asked the administration why their lists of domestic terror organizations don’t include wingnuts who bomb clinics and murder doctors but do include peaceful dissidents? I didn’t think so. Because we all know that Clinton got a blowjob, the greatest and most reported crime of the millennium, and that trumps everything else.

When the administration told you not to show pictures of the results of war (American coffins, dead and maimed civilians, and destroyed cities), did you act like a free and independent press and report what’s happening in the world, or did you just say, “Yes, Master! Whatever you say, Master”? After all, Clinton got a blowjob, the greatest and most reported crime since Cain slew Abel, and that trumps everything else.

I guess the demands of your 24/7 sleazathon of O.J., Jacko, blowjobs, Paula Abdul’s affairs, and runaway brides are just too much to allow for any time or energy to deal with issues that actually affect the American people.

I wondered for a good while why none of you would report about the Jeff Gannon, gay-male-prostitute-and-neocon-shill-in-the-White-House-press-corps story, but now I think I’ve figured it out. Simply, you’re all Jeff Gannon, so you see nothing there to report. Think about it: Jeff Gannon is a neocon shill; you’re all neocon shills. Jeff Gannon has no journalistic credentials or training; you might as well not, for all you use them. Jeff Gannon just regurgitates neocon talking points word-for-word in the “reports” on his website; you edit them slightly so they’ll fit between the commercials and this week’s sleazathon distraction. Jeff Gannon is a symbol of hypocrisy as a gay prostitute in with the in-crowd in this stridently gay-hating administration; you’re all symbols of hypocrisy pretending to do journalism. Jeff Gannon is a prostitute; you’re all presstitutes. James Guckert pretends to be someone he isn’t, Jeff Gannon; you pretend to be someone you’re not, a free and independent press. I guess you just don’t see any story there. Nothing unusual here, folks.

But there’s one thing I just don’t understand. You all want to try to out-Faux Faux and out-Foney Foney, to try to attract their viewers. I just don’t understand why you think the lovers of hate radio and Faux/Foney would want to leave real Faux for fake Faux and leave real Foney for phony Foney. But I can tell you this: If you would go back to being a news channel instead of a newsaganda channel, people who want actual news would come back to you. It would be so great to just turn on the TV and get the real news. For now I have to look for foreign news sources where they still have independent presses and search through the internet and try to figure out who’s telling the truth; but at least the truth is out there to be found. It isn’t there to be found on the corporate TV newsaganda cartel.

If anyone there at CNN has actually read this far, I thank you for reading my rant. But I would really, really thank you if you went back to doing actual journalism.

Sincerely,
XXXX XXXXXXX

I just hope anyone at CNN reads it. We can hope.

well thought out.

and I read the whole letter!!!

Great Letter, hope they read it.

:woohoo:
:applause: I can only applaud you on your letter. You certainly spoke for me.

But I will write as well, because I understand that numbers along with content counts for everything.

Hope he takes the time to read your letter....cause the truth is really all that you wrote about.

Kudos, and thank you for the wonderful letter!

Just one correction: It isn't spelled "foney", it is spelled "phony".

I'm really glad you brought up the things you did...the media needs to hear these things from all of us, all the time. DUers don't write the media enough to tell them they suck, methinks!

:woohoo: Thanks for sending this!

:kick::kick::kick:

I actually intended "Foney" where I spelled it that way, as a takeoff on Fox, same first two letters. One place I said "phony Foney," referring to their attempts to emulate Fox/Foney.

You said it exactly like it is. You have an excellent grasp of the facts.

crank something out, but I may head over to MSNBC as they're just as guilty.

That is a thing of beauty - anger meets the facts, head on.

Very well done.

Could you also post this at KOS? If you don't have an account, I can post it for you or maybe someone else can. This needs to be seen and read!

Feel free to post it there. Thanks.

Otherwise, I'll start one in the morning. I've only started one thread over there so it won't get much attention. :shrug:

Excellent letter!

at least on paper, it might be a little long. Even so, this stuff NEEDS TO BE SAID.

Bless your heart.

I know it's REALLY hard sometimes to feel motivated to do anything, to try any legitimate means to reach these people and maybe (dare I even hope) to get through to them. Especially when, let's face it, we ALL know what we're really up against - with the bush/rove "right" wing media machine pulling against us. That you took the time to do this and send it, that you showed the courage and commitment to try to make a difference and strike a blow for truth - speaks VERY highly for you, indeed. Especially if you've been battling even a shred of discouragement lately (as I have, myself, in the past few days - it's been pretty rough around casa calimary). To DO IT ANYWAY - well, what can I say except - I SALUTE YOU!!!

There are days when I almost decide to stop posting on DU entirely, to have a lower profile when they start rounding people up. My mood goes up and down. I've been on an up cycle the last couple days. There has been a lot of encouraging stuff on the "greatest" page for a couple days. And then a downer hits, like the 100-0 vote on Real ID. Keep the faith! No, keep your head down! Keep the faith! No, keep your head down! That's the story of my mood.

...tell this Jonathan Klein guy how you REALLY feel about the corporate media.


Seriously, great job!

:yourock:

very impressive - puts into real words why I refuse to watch any network "news" now.

will you marry me??? :D

maybe, if you're as cute as your kitties.

I hope he thinks about what you've written. I'm not optimistic, however.

Now if they will only read and heed...

You sure hit all the nails on the head. I hope the lazy Bas*****
read this. If they weren't blind already their eyeballs would be burning.

They know they've sold their integrity and you've really rubbed their noses in it.

What a knockout post.

and I hope you report back if he responds!

Has been what you are doing-I couldn't find the STREET ADDRESS-aka snail mail for CNN. (I tried for ten minutes and all I got was the e-mail)

I'm going to assume yours is correct and get a letter out myself.

I have this idea that SNAIL MAIL is more potent. I've gotten a response to every snail mail sent to my senators-and congressmen-even when they aren't in my state. (I realize they have more in it for them to respond as they want my vote but still it is impressive to be heard even if it's a damn form letter)

I have an idea that all the e-mails in the world would pale to a bucket load of MAIL that someone has to sort or at least physically throw away if nothing else that makes a much bigger impression than the "delete all messages now" button.

I think the extra effort, the bogging down of the post office, all of it could make a wee bit of difference. That's what I'd like to see- a massive letter writting campaign by DU to the media and have them forced to deal with it's actual heft. Put all our bitching (and I KNOW it's warranted to work)

Just an idea.

SNAIL MAIL is more potent

I've never worked in a place that got feedback from the public, but everyone who has seems to say the same thing, that a physical paper letter carries much more weight than an email or a phone call. I don't know if it's because they're less technologically savvy or if it's because they recognize that more energy and commitment are behind a physical letter or if it's because it requires more effort by them to handle the physical letter. Also a physical letter requires more of the sender than a couple mouse clicks to copy and paste something, and you have to step out of your everyday routine to do it, whereas sending an email doesn't require getting off your butt, if you work at a computer like many of us and then sit at a computer at home at night to read email and surf.

I don't remember where I copied the street address for CNN from, but it sounded familiar when I copied it. I think that CNN, Atlanta would be sufficient to get a letter there.

So well written and perfectly executed.

I don't think it will change anything, but hopefully it will be a wakeup call.

I'd sign on to every last word of it. GREAT JOB!! :toast:

it needs to be widely circulated.


The peabrains at CNN probably dont' have the attention span to read past the first 2 paragraphs....or, their feelings might be way too hurt to go any further.

Send a cc to Aaron Brown...see what that pompous ass thinks.

you are awesome!!!

:toast:

Whichever network breaks ranks with the cartel stands to make a BIG and long-lasting score. People still remember, fifty years later, that it was Edward R. Murrow of CBS News who broke ranks and reported the truth about Joe McCarthy. Who'll be first with Bushco?

I've had similar thoughts - one of the majors should step out on a limb and just do it! Isn't business supposed to be about "taking risks"? It stands to reason that they have a chance to reap huge DIVIDENDS by leaving the echo chambers in the dust.

Besides, the American people DO have a RIGHT TO KNOW the TRUTH!

My comment that whichever one breaks ranks with the cartel will score big refers, of course, to ratings and the revenue they get from ratings (and perhaps prestige and Pulitzers). However, all the networks are owned by huge corporations for whom news is only a small part of their operations. I suspect that controlling the national dialogue and the national government are much more important to them than any revenue they get from news. Therefore, they just don't care if their news ratings are in the toilet.

I'm not sure a separate thread on this would go anywhere. I don't see it getting enough comments to stay kicked within viewing range and I don't see an angle on it likely to land it on the "greatest" page where it would get visibility.

I have another media-cartel-related idea rolling around in the back of my mind, but it's not well-formed yet and may take days or weeks to become so. If it doesn't get side-tracked by discouragement or fear (see calimary's reply #13 and my reply #30).

BTW, business is only about taking risks for small startups and for "free enterprise" propaganda. And they don't give a FF about the American people's right to know the truth.

Great letter.

If anyone else would like contacting CNN to complain, I have an additional suggestion.

I recommend folks contact CNN programs/personalities directly from their "feedback" page. I think when a show gets a lot of "negative" responses (there's a neg. or pos. check box, and a comment section to the online form) , it get's noticed.

I think the "smoking gun memo" is the most current and explosive news story of the hour/day/week/year/decade/century, and at the root of many others mentioned in the letter above. For the feedback form, stay specific on one topic (at a time).

Here's a link to the page.
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/cnntv/

Scroll down to this direct feedback area (COMMENTS ABOUT CNN TV ANCHORS AND REPORTERS). I would target Judy Woodruff and Wolf Blitzer, regarding the smoking gun "Blair Memo".

:yourock:

I love the way you closed.

"If you would go back to being a news channel instead of a newsaganda channel, people who want actual news would come back to you. It would be so great to just turn on the TV and get the real news. For now I have to look for foreign news sources where they still have independent presses and search through the internet and try to figure out who’s telling the truth; but at least the truth is out there to be found. It isn’t there to be found on the corporate TV newsaganda cartel."

When blasting someone, it is ALWAYS healthy and helpful to end on a positive note with realistic recommendations for fixxing the problem.

a link to this wonderful rant of yours to everyone I know. What a great piece of truth. :thumbsup:

for the compliment and for emailing it around.

in fact the next time I need to vent effectively (as my rants sound like garbled snarls lately) I will look you up and ask for help if you don't mind ;)