CNN, HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

In the 21 April Trends Journal, we reported how Jeff Zucker, Chairman of CNN, seized on the coronavirus to pump up the cable networks failing ratings:

Ratings Soar, Ads Vanish at CNN

Pandemic coverage boosts viewership

On a recent conference call, CNN chief Jeff Zucker urged editors and producers at the network not to shift focus from coronavirus new updates despite weeks of wall-to-wall coverage of the pandemic.
“You need to stay on the news,” Mr. Zucker said, according to a person who listened. “People are coming to CNN for the news right now.”
The 16 April WSJ article noted, “TV ratings suggest his hunch was on target.”
According to Nielsen data, CNN total primetime viewers averaged 2.2 million in the first week of April. This is more than double the viewership in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Doubling down on their “how low can you go, do anything to increase viewership” mentality, in the most disgusting case of what used to be called “journalism,” last Tuesday, CNN posted this headline story:

US coronavirus cases surpass 1 million and the death

toll is greater than US losses in Vietnam War

 As some researchers say deaths could rise significantly in coming weeks, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States has topped 1 million and the deaths toll has surpassed the total of US troop fatalities during the Vietnam War.
As of Tuesday evening, there are more than 1,012,000 people in the United States who have or have had the virus, according to a tally from health officials by Johns Hopkins University. At least 58,356 people have died.
The first known US coronavirus-related fatality was February 6, less than three months ago.
TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal often refers to CNN as the “Cartoon News Network.” But after reading this incredibly misleading and ignorant story comparing COVID-19 to the Vietnam War, it might be more appropriate to refer to CNN as the “Colossal Nitwit Network.”
Absent in their comic-book quality “news” story is the fact that beyond the 58,220 young American boys CNN said were killed in Vietnam, they failed to mention the over 300,000 American soldiers who were seriously wounded in action with amputations and crippling wounds… at a rate 300 percent higher than in World War II.
Add to that the 2015 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found “over 270,000 Vietnam veterans have current full Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),” meaning they have been living lives filled with pain and suffering… and how the war divided the nation.
TRENDPOST: Also conveniently ignored by the CNN Presstitutes of the lowest order are the three million Vietnamese that Americans killed, and the estimates of millions more wounded in yet another U.S. war launched by psychopathic presidents based on lies:

 30-Year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War

 Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.
“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression”, announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.
That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
But there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam – no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.
A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media… leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.
The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against a U.S. destroyer on “routine patrol” in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 – and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a “deliberate attack” on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.
The truth was very different… — FAIR, 27 July 1994
Yes, the truth was very different, but no different than today.
As FAIR, the national progressive media watchdog group, noted, the mainstream media sold the American people the Vietnam War based on lies. As the records prove, nothing has changed.
For example, it was America’s media which sold the lies that “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” also, the first Iraq War, the Afghan War, the Libyan War, the Syrian War, the Yemen War, etc.
TRENDPOST: While CNN’s comparison of COVID-19 to the Vietnam War is pathetic, using war as an analogy in dealing with the virus is a favorite tool of politicians hoping to look brave in a crisis:

• French President Emmanuel Macron defended his strict COVID-19 lockdown because “We are at war… the enemy is there – invisible, elusive – and it is advancing.”
•  UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in explaining his strategy for COVID-19, said, “We must act like any wartime government.”
• President Donald Trump – who’s daddy paid a doctor to help him beat getting drafted into the Vietnam War because he had a bone spur – said, “Our war against the Chines virus… I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime President.”
•  Declared Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, “We are at war.”

 Adding Insult to Stupidity
 Also neglected by CNN in comparing the deaths in the Vietnam War to the COVID War are the millions of dead Vietnamese and Americans poisoned by the Pentagon and the Washington warmongers’ “Operation Ranch Hand,” which sprayed more than 20 million gallons of poisonous Agent Orange over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from 1961 through 1971.
Indeed, the levels of mental madness continually dealt out by demented political and military “leaders” has become the American Way.
For example, the public accepts its President’s bombing runs over Syria for alleging, without proof, that the ruling government dropped chlorine barrel bombs on their enemy. Missing from history is the U.S. genocide of spraying tons of poisons across entire nations to kill food crops, seafood, and trees. This enabled our bombing runs to kill more of the “enemy” would by depraving them of a place to hide and/or insuring their starvation.
For the CNN scum of the earth and other media which promoted and compared the COVID War to Vietnam War, yesterday marks the 50th anniversary of Ohio National Guardsmen slaughtering four Kent State University students and seriously wounding nine others for protesting the murderous war.
But today, there are no protests against America’s ongoing wars and the new ones we are inciting against Iran and Venezuela. And the media and its Presstitutes are again saluting War-Criminal-in-Chief George W. Bush, who has called on the nation to unite in its fight against the COVID War.