News/Commentary

New CNN boss wants his staff to stop calling Trump’s election fraud claims ‘the big lie’

June 16, 2022 | | Print Article

New CNN head honcho Chris Licht has reportedly “discouraged” the network’s notoriously left-wing staff from using Nazi terminology to refer to former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

During a conference call Tuesday, Licht told “management and show executive producers” that he prefers that staff members stop using the term “the big lie” when speaking about Trump, according to Mediaite.

The network has reportedly used the phrase 168+ times this month alone.

Below is one of many examples:

“Licht was asked for his thoughts on ‘the big lie,’ and said he preferred that staff avoid the term. He made clear this was a preference, not a mandate, but staffers have taken it as a clear directive from the new boss,” Mediaite reported Wednesday.

“He encouraged producers to instead use the terms ‘Trump election lie’ or ‘election lies’ in banners and graphics. According to a source, Licht argued that using ‘the big lie’ makes the mistake of adopting branding used by the Democratic Party, thereby weakening the objectivity of the network.”

While it’s true the term is currently being used by the Democrat Party, it actually originated with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

The Jewish Virtual Library, a project of the American–Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, notes that Hitler coined “the big lie” in “Mein Kampf.”

“Adolf Hitler applied it to the behavior of Jews rather than as a tactic he advocated. Specifically, he accused Viennese Jews of trying to discredit the Germans’ activities during World War I,” according to the library.

Not til later was “the big lie” associated with deceased Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ efforts to breed hatred against the Jewish people.

Critics have long complained about the left’s use of this term given its Nazi roots:

But CNN’s far-left staff feel differently about the matter.

“It’s worrisome that we’re being told how to talk about one of the worst things that ever happened to American democracy. We have to call lies, lies, whether they’re small lies or big lies. Is there any lie bigger than that lie?” one disgruntled insider told Mediaite.

Note that CNN was among the many networks that falsely labeled the violent, destructive, deadly Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 “peaceful protests.”

The insider speculated that Licht’s directive may be coming from higher up the chain, namely from CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

“They speculated that the directive could be coming from Warner Bros. Discovery board member John Malone, who has criticized CNN’s approach to news under former boss Zucker,” according to Mediaite.

“It seems to indicate where things are headed. We didn’t have this problem until John Malone was sitting on the board of this company,” the insider said.

Last year, before Time/Warner merged with Discovery Media, the latter’s top shareholder, John Malone, called for CNN to “evolve back” to real journalism.

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said.

He said specifically that he’d prefer this fate to the alternative, which would be for the then-soon-to-be formed Warner Bros. Discovery to just ditch CNN altogether.

News of Licht’s latest guidance comes only weeks after he issued a directive calling for the network to offer more “nuance” and less “hype.”

The result, as reported by The New York Times, is that “CNN’s ubiquitous ‘Breaking News’ banner is gone, now reserved for instances of truly urgent events”; “[s]narky onscreen captions … are discouraged”; [p]olitical shows are trying to book more conservative voices”; and “producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far right and the far left.”

In other words, CNN has finally taken a tiny step toward becoming a real news network instead of just a left-wing propaganda outlet.

But given the pushback Licht’s already facing from inside the company, it’s unclear how long CNN’s venture into real journalism will last.

Vivek Saxena
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