CNN's wide-ranging attempts to render their own network unwatchable continue to impress.
Jason Miller, a former top aide to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his transition team, is joining CNN as a paid contributor, effective today, POLITICO confirmed. [...]
Miller served as a senior communications director for Trump’s presidential campaign and served in a senior communications role for Trump’s transition team following the election. He was appointed as White House communications director, but quickly backed out after allegations that he had had an affair with another Trump transition official surfaced.
For the record: CNN's election coverage was uninformed, uninformative, crude, insincere, aggressively issue-averse, and in many cases consisted of propaganda claims pulled directly from the Trump campaign. It was actively insulting to its viewers and unwatchable for anyone who desired more from national political coverage than loud shouting and key-jingling distractions. This was almost entirely due to 1.) Jeffrey Lord and 2.) the inclusion of "pro-Trump" voices culled from Trump's own campaign, who repeatedly and unapologetically lied about even basic facts with little to no pushback from the hosts and, apparently, no network regard for whether or not regularly distributing false information under the supposed banner of "news" was a disservice to their viewers or damaging to the country itself.
Miller continues that tradition.
He is pro-Trump—and was egregiously dishonest in that role. His praise for this or that Trump notion, and his praise the next day for Trump perhaps reversing his opinion, and the day after that for Trump perhaps declaring that he never had any opinions at all, is no more relevant to the national conversation than the flat-earthers. It is steaming garbage of the sort that would do well on North Korean television, but something we are supposed to be “above” in our own Enlightened Informed Democracy.
CNN president Jeff Zucker has repeatedly defended the network’s decision to hire Trump surrogates to serve as contributors, arguing that if they were not on the channel's panels, there would be no pro-Trump voices.
Which has been the whole issue, of course. CNN was faced with a candidate so deplorable that none of their usual conservative pundits would back up his regularly ludicrous statements. There were no think tanks endorsing Trump's views, and no Republican leaders wanted to pop in to explain how his latest racist or sexist rant was evidence of a presidential temperament, so to gain sufficiently "pro-Trump" views the network had to write checks to ex-Trump staffers directly.
A "news" network might have looked at the widespread "serious conservative" revulsion toward Trump and concluded that the story was, in fact, that Donald Trump was revolting. Zucker instead decided that the need to give a flattering view of the candidate outweighed the collected expertise of his own network, and promptly went out to search for sycophants who would bend the network's coverage into that flattering view.
Jason Miller, though? You have to be scraping the very bottom of the barrel to come up with Jason Miller as your next Trump-fluffer. Even Donald Damn Trump refrained from keeping him on staff.