CNN hires former Jeff Sessions GOP operative as political editor
The television news network CNN made a really bad decision this week in hiring Sarah Isgur Flores, a former spokesmouth for racist grandpappy and former Trump AG Jeff Sessions, as CNN's new politics editor.
The 2020 elections are around the corner, and this is the direction they're going?
The only 3 words that should be coming out of Donald Trump's mouth this week are: "Clinton" "foundation" "emails"
- Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons) August 23, 2016
Yes, that's right, @whignewtons won't be a commentator like Corey Lewandowski and other dirtbags who slithered over from the Trump administration. Not an opinionator. But an editor, despite having NO NEWS EXPERIENCE.
CNN deserves every ounce of shit they're getting over this awful move, and the best take I've read so far is by Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post.
In early 2017, Isgur was summoned to meet with President Trump in the Oval Office where she needed to pledge her loyalty to be named the Department of Justice spokeswoman by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Now CNN has hired Isgur - who has no journalism experience and once slammed her new employer as the "Clinton News Network" - as a political editor.
The network, under heavy fire for the move, was insisting by Tuesday night that she wouldn't be directing political coverage, although that surely is what a political editor might be expected to do.
She is helping to "coordinate coverage across TV and Digital," a spokesman told Vox, and will be "making sure that stories are featured on the right shows and articles get posted online at the right time."
That sounds a lot like damage control.
But why CNN made this move to begin with is the deeper and more troubling question.
It strongly suggests that the network's big thinkers - including head honcho Jeff Zucker - are aiming for a kind of false fairness: a defensive, both-sides-are-equal kind of political coverage that inevitably fails to serve the voting public.
This approach is not guided by what's good for citizens, but by a ratings-first effort to position the network in the middle of Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left.
READ MORE: CNN's hiring of a GOP operative as political editor is even worse than it looks
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Boing Boing (@boingboing) on Feb 19, 2019 at 10:33am PST
PHOTO, TOP: Cropped detail from a photo by Del Quentin Wilber, Chicago Tribune. Jeff Sessions speaks to Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for his confirmation, as he arrives at the Justice Department for the first time as attorney general on Feb. 9, 2017.