Talk about a lack of self-awareness.
Here is the headline right here at Newsmax:
The story says, in part, this:
“Apparently jolted by the fact Newsmax has skyrocketed to become the 4th highest-rated cable news channel in the country, the liberal CNN is decrying what it calls Newsmax's "election denialism" and is seeking to have it ‘deplatformed’ from cable and satellite systems across the nation.
Oliver Darcy, CNN's leftwing media critic, has been demanding cable operators drop Newsmax, which is currently carried by every major system in the nation. Newsmax is also streamed free by most OTT platforms and devices.
…’We are going to have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem,’ Alex Stamos, a former Facebook chief security officer, told CNN's Stelter. ‘These companies have freedom of speech, but I'm not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.’
In a brazen call for censorship, Stamos echoed CNN demand conservative voices and news outlets be blacklisted and closed out of cable television and the Internet.
‘We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences,’ Stamos said.”
As a former CNN'er myself, I must say former Bush 43 press secretary Ari Fleischer got it exactly right when he was quoted in the story as saying this:
"You knew it would happen. Some want to take conservative media off the air because they bought into Trump's election theories. On those grounds, shouldn't CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC be taken off the air because they bought into [Russian] collusion theories? This censorship must stop."
From the very beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency CNN fed the Trump-Russian conspiracy/collusion story that, in fact, was a flat-out lie. The president called CNN “fake news” and at his rallies the crowds would spontaneously burst into chants of “CNN sucks.”
But neither the president or anyone else on the conservative side ever called for CNN to be “de-platformed” and taken off the air.
Recall that James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas had captured a free-wheeling and secretly videotaped CNN producer who said this of the Trump-Russia lies by his network. The Federalist headlined what was said:
'I think the president is probably right to say, like, 'Look, you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun. You have no real proof.''
And right there is the problem. CNN’s Oliver Darcy and Brian Stelter are exposing a stunning lack of self-awareness. The network pushed the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense right from the start — and it was a flat-out lie.
From Big Tech to Big Media, the push is now on to silence conservative voices. In fact, this has been going on for years. Today the target is Newsmax. In the past it has been Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, not to mention one Fox host after another.
The targets change and the methods vary. In the case of Newsmax the demand is to de-platform. In Rush’s case the game was to pressure his advertisers to drop him. So too was this the game with other conservative hosts on radio or TV.
Make no mistake. The move to silence conservatives across the board is on.
For standing on the floor of the United States Senate to defend the integrity of the American election process — not to mention the Constitution — Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has had his book contract on big tech canceled.
Now Loews Hotels has cancelled his use of an Orlando Loews for a February fundraiser. Notably Loews is owned by the Tisch family, prominent Democrats. The head of Loews, Jonathan Tisch, is recorded at the FEC as a major contributor to the Biden campaign as well as the campaigns of multiples of other Democrats.
As author and conservative thinker David Horowitz told Newsmax recently, all of this and so much more are “the initial stages to becoming a fascist state.”
Horowitz is right. That this kind of totalitarian nonsense should be coming, of all places, from CNN journalists is as inexcusable as it is dangerous.
Which is exactly why conservatives, who believe in free speech and a free press, will not be calling for CNN to be de-platformed.