During the past few weeks, Cable News Network, commonly known as CNN, has been attacked by MoveOn PAC Media Action and other left-winged political organizations for hiring more conservative political analysts in an attempt to attract Americans who routinely tune in to Fox News, a well-known conservative cable news channel. However, these claims from such liberal organizations are a bit extreme.
For many years, CNN has been one of the most trustworthy cable news channels because of its assorted line-up of political analysts ranging from liberal to conservative, which gives viewers the opportunity to hear both sides of the political spectrum. This is definitely a big difference from Fox News, which gives a more conservative outlook on most issues, and especially, a move up from the much more alarming liberal bias that plagues most of the news media in the United States.
CNN’s hiring of more conservative analysts started because of an incident that occurred while on air in August of 2005 in which Robert Novak, a 74 year old former conservative commentator for CNN, stormed off the set cursing. Novak, whose contract with CNN ended in December, was expected to be dismissed from CNN anyway because of criticism regarding his part in the CIA leak case. In addition, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has also left CNN. This left CNN with a majority of liberal commentators making political discussions on CNN too far to the left.
As a result, CNN executives decided to hire a few conservatives to their staff in order regain their role in the media as a fairly moderate news channel.
Among the new right-winged commentators are Bill Bennett, who was the secretary of education under former President Ronald Reagan, and former Republican congressman J.C. Watts, who, according to NewsMax.com, is expected “to offer regular analysis on politics and government policy.”
Unable to comprehend CNN’s reasoning behind this move, liberal extremist Noah Winer of MoveOn PAC Media Action immediately attacked CNN and e-mailed members of the MoveOn PAC Web site urging them to “stop CNN from hiring right-wing misinformer [Bill Bennett]” and to “stop CNN from becoming Fox News.”
In his e-mails, Winer accuses CNN of becoming more like Fox News in a time period in which it is most important for CNN to offer ideas from both sides of the political spectrum.
Winer does not, however, give any acknowledgement to CNN for keeping the network’s major liberal analysts, Paul Begala and James Carville, despite comments made by CNN that say they are not making a rush to the right and that they just want to balance the network’s political commentary discussions. Regarding the hiring of Bennett, who happens to be a former Fox News contributor, CNN President Jon Klein said, “Bill’s experience as one of the nation’s most influential and provocative conservative thinkers will provide our viewers with a unique perspective on many political issues.”
With Republicans currently in majority control of all three government branches, terrorism a grave threat, and America’s liberal media criticizing President George W. Bush’s every move, the people of the United States desperately need a non-biased news channel now more than ever to give them factual information and balanced political commentary. It seems as if CNN is the only network that could do just this.
