Being the loyal Trump stenographers they are, the crew at CNSNews.com turned the sycophancy on full-blast for its coverage of President Trump’s State of the Union address.
First, in a combination of padding and ego-stroking, CNS cranked out a whopping seven articles on the speech itself and things directly related to it when they could have been combined into one or two:
- Trump: ‘Americans Are Dreamers Too’
- Trump: US Foreign Aid Should ‘Only Go to Friends of America’
- Trump Touts Low Unemployment During SOTU Address
- Trump Calls for Unity in His First State of the Union Address
- Trump: ‘Remove Federal Employees Who Undermine the Public Trust or Fail the American People’
- Trump Uses SOTU to Honor Parents of Teenage Girls Killed by MS-13
- Trump Uses SOTU to Highlight North Korean Defector’s Plight
CNS followed this with an article parroting Paul Ryan’s praise of the speech, followed by an article about how “conservative leaders” loved the speech.
From there, CNS goes into attack mode, courtesy of a couple of sneering opinion pieces presented as “news” by Susan Jones, who’s prone to this sort of thing. In the first, Jones takes a shot at the ACLU because “The American Civil Liberties Union — note the word ‘American’ in its title — complained Tuesday night about President Trump’s repeated use of the word “America” in his State of the Union speech” because Trump’s vision of America is dramatically different from that of most people. Jones’ idea of a response is to rehash Trump’s proposed immigration policy. This was accompanied by a reposting of a 2014 article by editor Terry Jeffrey complaining that President Obama “used the first person singular–including the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ and the adjective ‘my’–199 times” in a speech. (CNS had a thing about counting Obama’s words.)
In the second, Jones recounts a Fox News segment in which Tucker Carlson bashed a Democratic congressman who left the chair next to him at the speech empty in honor of an Ohio resident who was deported, cheering how Carlson was “cutting off [the congressman] with the video equivalent of a mic drop.”
That’s the way “journalism” works at CNS these days.