What on Earth Is Going on at CNN?

Everybody makes mistakes in this business of journalism and commentary. It’s inevitable if you’ve spent enough time in the game — if you talk or write for a living, eventually you’ll botch a fact, speak too loosely off the cuff, make casual assumptions without doublechecking, etc. Why, just the other day, I myself misidentified Brad Lander as the deputy mayor of New York City in a piece, and had to fight the impulse to fall on the nearest convenient katana.

So I can forgive a factual fumble every now and then. But there is a difference between that and whatever the hell is currently going on at CNN with their coverage of the Gracie Mansion attack. Hopefully you have already familiarized yourself with the media’s scandalous initial reluctance to address the Islamist terrorist elephant in the room in its reporting and headlines — every rhetorical contortion and creative writing technique available to J-schoolers was employed over the weekend to obscure the ugly truth that Islamic terrorists nearly blew up scores of New Yorkers.

But that was over the weekend. By Monday, most media outlets seemed to “right the ship” in terms of their coverage of the Gracie Mansion attack. Except for CNN that is, which has continued to embarrass itself like a drunk lunging from one lamppost to the next, stumbling through a series of shambolic blows to its dignity and credibility. Did someone spike the water cooler over there? I ask only because their botching of this story is not limited to any one employee or even platform.

On Tuesday, CNN published its now-legendary (and since heavily revised) “human interest” story about jihadist bombers Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, which began ever-so-wistfully: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather. But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change . . .” (I read this line and thought to myself “that could only come from a J-schooler,” and wouldn’t you know it, the author is a recent Columbia Journalism grad.)

Given how widely mocked that story was around the internet — CNN deleted the tweet associated with it and hastily rewrote the piece — you might have thought that would be the end of it. Buddy, it wasn’t even the end of it at their own network. Later that afternoon CNN anchor Abby Phillip casually referred to the Gracie Mansion attack as an “attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani,” explicitly peddling the line that other, subtler headlines tried to merely imply. (Maybe she was only reading off a teleprompter, you say? Fine, then — so who wrote the script?)

But we weren’t done yet at CNN! Today, the network’s improperly hyphenated print reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote up a call between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Mayor Mamdani, characterizing Mamdani as being a “fellow target of political violence.” As if that wasn’t enough, CNN contributor Ana Navarro capped it all off by revealing, at length, her complete ignorance of any details of the case, characterizing it as an “attempt against Mayor Mamdani in New York who was raised Muslim, was he not?” When a stunned Joe Borelli attempted to correct Navarro, she bleated, “But it was at his house!”

I don’t know if this sort of ignorance is ideologically driven, down to simple pig-ignorance, or the product of a black-op psychological experiment involving LSD in the CNN water supply. All I can say is that with David Ellison and Paramount about to acquire Warner Bros. and CNN, this seems like a really inauspicious moment for CNN’s employees and on-air personalities to reveal just how out of touch from reality they are, given that they’re purportedly in the news business.