In an Aug. 17 NewsBusters post, P.J. Gladnick lamented that “Two more conservative commentators at CNN appear to have joined the growing club of suppressed conservative pundits,” asserting that “the reason for the sidelining appears to have been due to pressure from the left.”
But when it came to the actual reported reasons for these two conservatives — Ben Ferguson and Steve Cortes — to be sidelined, Gladnick was a lot less forthcoming. He let pass without comment excerpts he inserted from The Hollywood Reporter that explained things way down in his post. In the 16th paragraph, he repeated a Reporter statement that “Ferguson’s absence seems to have followed a March 6 story by the progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters for America called ‘CNN commentator Ben Ferguson’s Facebook page is a cesspool of bigotry, false info and fabricated quotes.'”
Media Matters pointed out that Ferguson “regularly uses his Facebook page to post memes with false information and fabricated quotes” and engages in anti-black bigotry. He had even used his Facebook page to promote “vitriolic and conspiratorial attacks” against CNN, the network that employed him. Does Gladnick think this sort of thing is perfectly fine coming from a conservative commentary.
Gladnick’s cut-and-paste of the Reporter’s statement on Cortes appeared slightly earlier — in the 10th paragraph — but went similarly unremarked upon. The Reporter stated that Cortes’ benching appeared around the time he appeared in a PragerU video insisting that media claims that President Trump praised white supremacists as “very fine people” were false. Except, well, it wasn’t.
But who needs facts when there’s a narrative to reinforce? Gladnick does his duty here, huffing that “Apparently that commitment to ‘ideological diversity’ by [CNN chief Jeff] Zucker at CNN is true but only if it runs from far left to merely very liberal” and that “Liberals can’t stand a serious opposing view. They can only stomach never-Trump Republicans that sound like Democrats, like Max Boot.”
That’s the point of Gladnick’s post. The facts are purely incidental.