Political Rants

By Rob Schaeffer

So I have lost all respect for CNN. I lost all respect for Fox News a while back, to the point where I have the TV skip over it when I surf, when Fox ran something saying that the ACLU is the biggest threat to America today.

But, Wednesday night on The Daily Show, they had two clips from CNN. The first one was covering the new law in Texas banning gays and bisexuals from taking in foster children. They had the typical two points-of-view and a two anchors on a split screen. The person who supported the law referred to a study supposedly showing that children raised by gays are eleven times more likely to be abused. They then showed the person who supported gay rights saying he had never heard of that study, and then cut off him to go back to the two anchors. At this point in The Daily Show John Stewart says that they checked up on that report and it was from one person who, well, had an ax to grind and the report was totally bogus. Then John Stewart says that next we will see the CNN anchors report that this eleven times statistic was bogus. Nope. We see the anchors joking amongst themselves.

So, bottom line, The Daily Show does more fact-checking than CNN. The Daily Show. This episode started with a disclaimer to any chimpanzees watching that they don’t endorse smoking. I found the report in about five minutes on a 56k modem. It is somewhat biased. Here is the home page that report was on; start there and then see the report.

Then CNN is covering Bush’s speech on energy. Right after Bush says that we will be depending on technology to deal with high energy costs, the signal cuts out. They go back to the anchor who makes no mention of the fact that an amazingly ironic thing just happened. Once again John Stewart asks, “Are they living in an irony-free zone?”

What is with this? Is CNN too lazy to do five minutes with Google or are they terrified of the religious right and don’t want to make waves?

I will be funny again next time, promise.