I can’t imagine why CNN’s ratings are down over 50% in the key demo compared to this time last year.

There’s a pending decision everyone in the political world is waiting on from the Supreme Court that deals with whether the Trump administration can add a citizenship question to the census. Now, if you are a normal human being, nothing about that seems controversial at all. In fact, the question has been on the census many times before and it makes perfect sense that you’d want to know how many citizens a country has.

Because it’s Trump though, it had to turn into a scandal and left-wing advocacy groups sued, claiming that the question is based on a study that it wasn’t actually based on. Not that it should matter anyway, as the idea that the President loses his statutory authority based on the feels of liberals makes no constitutional sense.

Enter CNN, who put out an article yesterday with one of the most insane headlines I’ve seen.

Will the Supreme Court approve adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census? It wouldn't be the first time the nation's highest court has acted to preserve white power, critics say. https://t.co/VjV8Whr5Do pic.twitter.com/PtCpLSuQLa — CNN (@CNN) June 24, 2019

Keep in mind, this is not an editorial. It’s a hard news piece in their news section, i.e. it’s supposed to be an unbiased presentation of the facts.

It doesn’t end at the headline either. They go on to compare a census question to Plessy v. Ferguson.

The 30-year-old man of mixed-race heritage sat in the whites-only section of the train. When a conductor ordered him to move to a dingy rail car reserved for blacks, he refused, was arrested and convicted at a trial. The man appealed his case to the Supreme Court. Four years later, the court rejected his claim that sitting in a segregated train car stamped him with “a badge of servitude.” The New York Times published only two paragraphs on the 7-1 decision. But Homer Adolph Plessy, the man on the train, did not fade from history. Plessy v. Ferguson eventually became known as one of the Supreme Court’s most nakedly racist decisions. The 1896 ruling played a pivotal role in giving legal cover to Jim Crow segregation that would last for more than half a century.

This makes no sense at all. What does that case have to do with the United States government gathering numbers on how many citizens there are? The answer is absolutely nothing. In the one case, a person is made to sit on a segregated bus. In another a person is…answering a question about citizenship.

They say the conservative majority on the court is on the verge of embracing some of the same legal rationalizations that produced Jim Crow segregation in the census case. “If they accept the census question, they are following the same pattern that the late-19th-century and 20th-century court made that was clearly intended to cement white rule,” says Lawrence Goldstone, author of “Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903.”

This is a game most mainstream media outlets play. By citing biased, one-sided “experts” and “scholars,” they are able to editorialize in what is supposed to a just the facts write-up. That’s exactly what happens here as CNN cites person after person making wild claims about white power and racism.

But critics say it’s really about a deeper question: Will the new conservative majority on the court ignore what opponents of the question call “smoking-gun evidence” that the case is really about preserving “white power”?

Some court watchers expect they will and that they will do this by borrowing some of the same tactics their counterparts used in the late 19th century to legitimize Jim Crow segregation.

The article just keeps going on and on like that. I won’t quote anymore of it so as not to run afoul of fair use. Even past the bias of the above excerpts, why would CNN not also include some voices from those in favor the Supreme Court upholding the census question? Those people not only exist, they are plentiful. What makes all this especially ironic is that CNN is constantly lecturing other outlets about journalist standards. Meanwhile, they seemingly have none at all. The fact that such an article was every allowed to be published in the condition it’s in testifies to a complete lack of journalist ethics as the cable news outlet. If Fox News put out an article like that, accusing a liberal Supreme Court of being racist and only quoting affirmative opinions, Brian Stetler would lose his mind. Let this be another example of why the mainstream media are just dead at this point. There is no coming back from the garbage they’ve chosen to dabble in the last three years. They don’t get their credibly back at this point, no matter what amends they may try to make after Trump is gone. Conservatives should hold them accountable by treating them with the respect they deserve, which is precisely none. CNN is no more non-partisan than Breitbart.

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