The Media Research Center’s for engaging in mockery and ridicule instead of serious media criticism — especially when it comes to CNN — reared its ugly head yet again in covering the CNN show “King Charles.” Jorge Bonilla devoted a Nov. 30 post that amounted to little more than whining that the show was allowed to exist:
After much promotional pomp and circumstance, the collaborative series featuring Gayle King and Charles Barkley, titled with the clever eponym “King Charles”, finally launched as a “limited series”. Does the show live up to the hype or is it more of the same performative wokery in a different package for CNN viewers?
In a nutshell, it’s more of the same.
The show kicks off with a bold promise in its intro: “We won’t waste your time”. Some uncomfortable early banter in-studio is highlighted by Barkley needing to clarify that “King Charles” is not self-puffery but a play on both hosts’ names: Gayle King, Charles Barkley. That right there is an indication that the show is doomed to fail because of you’re having to explain the show’s title within the first two minutes, you’re definitely losing. The show offers a call-in number where people can leave their voice mails. Not quite the Larry King callback, but there you go.
Actually, the show’s title isn’t that hard to figure out, even for someone like Bonilla who gets paid to hate all things CNN. He concluded his review with more hate:
The show ends with its first voice mail- a prank voice mail from Shaquille O’Neal to Barkley. One might reasonably be led to believe that every other voice mail was critical of the programming.
If this maiden broadcast is any indication, “King Charles” failed to live up to its promise. You all did waste our time.
Of course, the MRC has always hated King; a Jan. 12 post by Curtis Houck screeched that a party marking 12 years in her main job as co-host of “CBS Mornings” was “nauseating” and whined that she was called a “consummate professional.” Houck served up his own complaint about one episode of “KIng Charles” in a Jan. 18 post:
Wednesday night on their low-rated CNN show King Charles, CBS Mornings co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King and the NBA on TNT’s Charles Barkley blasted 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for her claim that America’s never been a racist country. However, the two went further with predictably liberal, 1619 Project tropes that “America was built on” both “racism” and “slavery.”
As Hillsdale College’s David Azerrad wrote in an compendious essay for Real Clear Public Affairs in 2020, this notion “is the great self-evident truth of the left and of the ruling class whose moral opinions are shaped by it” and wielded as “their most powerful political weapon” to lucrative financial benefits.
Houc didn’t disclose that Hillsdale is pushing right-wing indoctrination of students at other schools, which means that Azerrad’s essay is much more political than it is factual. Houck continued to rant that Barkley and King wouldn’t adhere to right-wing narratives:
After the two stated their agreement with each other, Barkley tried to offer a more nuanced view that we’re allowed to “criticize” America since it’s “the greatest country in the world” and merely “turn[ing] on the TV” will show there’s “racism” out there.
Two different matters, Chuck. It’s generally agreed slavery was present and it was such a tenuous issue at the time that a civil war ensued. But calling America a racist country and was built on it flew in the face of the Declaration of Independence, the Abolitionist movement, the lack of explicitly racist laws today, and major pieces of legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Barkley and King — two of the highest-paid TV personalities, regardless of color — have to keep the grievance train afloat, so Barkley sounded off on Haley for saying “something that stupid, and that’s just stupid.”
After the show ended its run, Nicholas Fondacaro spent an April 15 post dancing on its grave, insisting it was “canceled” even though his colleague Bonilla pointed out it was always going to be a limited-run show:
After six months, CNN finally took their poorly-rated primetime show King Charles out back and put it out of its misery. Airing just one night a week on Wednesdays, King Charles was one of the last vestiges of the Chris Licht era of CNN leadership, which purportedly tried to achieve a more fair and balanced approach to reporting the news before an internal revolt of the network’s radical liberals quashed it.
Since you’ve likely never heard of the show since its ratings were so poor, no, the show was not hosted by the king of England, but rather CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King and NBA on TNT personality Charles Barkley.
CNN thought they were being clever by splicing their names together.
Since the November premiere, the show has been a ratings disaster. “The long-hyped premiere of the new weekly primetime series, which aired Wednesday at 10 pm, drew just 501,000 viewers, according to same-day Nielsen ratings,” reported the New York Post. “It finished a distant third among the biggest cable news channels in total viewers, ranking as the smallest of any of CNN’s primetime debuts this year.”
[…]Another possible factor in the show’s cancelation could have been that Barkley’s political ideology didn’t adhere to liberal dogma as staunchly as most CNN hosts.
In late February, on the show, Barkley told then-Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley: “Governor, I’m dying to vote for you. I want to give all my energy and all my heart behind your campaign.” His hang-up was her comments about America never being a racist country.
King, on the other hand, has a history of ultra-liberal punditry and has donated to the Obama campaign and vacationed with them as though she was part of the family.
Note the biased and unsupported claims Fondacaro made in his post — on top of falsely claiming the show was “canceled,” he claimed without evidence that King engaged only in “ultra-liberal punditry,” whatever that means. He also CNN is filled with “radical liberals” who got Licht fired when, in fact, it was his own forcing of right-wing agenda on the channel and his general incompetence in the job, as exposed in an devastating profile of him in The Atlantic, that sealed his fate.
This is yet another instance in which the MRC has chosen to spew hate instead of being thoughtful and reasonable — yet it continues to complain that its attacks are (accurately) seen as bad faith outside the right-wing bubble.