CNN star Chris Cillizza has Q & A session on Reddit, epic disaster ensues as critics savage his ethics

Fox News
Tue, 18 Jul 2017 00:00 UTC

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CNN's Chris Cillizza

Reddit commenters bashed CNN Politics editor Chris Cillizza during an "Ask Me Anything" forum on Tuesday, criticizing the reporter for his biased views and questioning his journalism ethics.

Cillizza hosted the one-hour online Reddit forum in the afternoon, welcoming users to ask him questions to answer. Most commenters immediately slammed the editor for the lack of balanced reporting in his articles and treating "politics like sport."

"Chris, have you considered the fact that your reporting style of repeated and absurd focus on completely inane subjects, like 'an analysis of the Trump-Macron handshake' not only makes us all collectively stupider, but fundamentally devalues the role politics has in shaping our lives in favor of absurd horse race coverage that focuses on inside baseball to the exclusion of real working families?" one commenter said.

"Why do you think so many other journalists think you suck?" another wrote, to which Cillizza replied: "Everyone -- even reporters -- is entitled to their opinion about my work."

"Why did CNN hire a joke such as yourself," another participant asked.

"Similarly, do you acknowledge in any way that there's an issue with treating politics as entertainment or sport rather than something with life-and-death consequences?" someone also commented.

However, the question that generated the most talk came from a user asking Cillizza about his approach to journalism and how it can "be damaging to the public dialogue."

The person specifically referenced Cillizza's comment, which stated: "My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument, but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be."

Cillizza replied, saying "perception matters LOTS in politics."

"We've seen it with the rise of Trump. I get asked ALL THE TIME why 'we' (the media) didn't fact-check Trump during the campaign. I always respond the same: We did! All the time!" Cillizza said.

He added that he is "evolving" as a journalist and making sure his reporting "portrays the fact that people don't necessarily change their minds based on proven facts."

Much of the forum included hundreds of joking questions such as, "Chris, how much do you really make? I assume the 8 figures thing on twitter had to be a joke" and "Are you willing to show the feet?"

More than 500 people left "questions" in the forum.

The AMA forum comes after CNN political commentator Angela Rye refused to call President Trump "her" president.

"There are a lot of things that your president has done to defy logic— let's at least acknowledge that," Rye said to Republican Rep. Jack Kingston.

"Your president, too, Angela. Your president, too," Kingston fired back.

"Well, he's your president," Rye said again, refusing to call Trump "her" president.

Comment: Too bad no one asked Cillizza to comment on any one of these points with any amount of seriousness:

Let me say this as clearly as I can: there is no valid reason to oppose the de-escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers. None. If you think that Trump has done a bad thing by purportedly working toward these de-escalations, I want you off of my planet before your idiotic neocon warmongering gets us all killed, you amoral f****** psychopath. The world would literally be better off without you. No I am not joking, no I am not exaggerating my position to make a point, and yes, I mean you, personally.

Stephen Cohen, easily the foremost American authority on US-Russian relations, has been delivering the message over and over and over again with increasing urgency that the pressures arising from the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory have placed us in a situation that is in some crucial ways more dangerous than the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us within a hair's breadth of nuclear annihilation. The fact that Trump faces unprecedented pressure to maintain escalations with a nuclear superpower under the threat of political repercussions should he ever yield an inch combined with Cohen's description of the following situation places us in a uniquely dangerous situation:

"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever. And the reason is that we're in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."

A 2014 report published in the journal Earth's Future found that it would only take the detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot into the earth's stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and making the photosynthesis of plants impossible, starving every terrestrial organism to death that didn't die of radiation or climate chaos first. The United States and Russia currently have about 7,000 nuclear warheads apiece that we know of.

So yes, I'm going to be f****** furious with anyone who feeds into those political pressures and tries to push the US president away from de-escalation and detente. These are my kids you're threatening. This is everything I've ever loved that your moronic partisan agendas are putting at risk. I don't care if you personally saw Vladimir Putin himself hacking a voting machine, there is no valid reason for you to support heightened tensions between two nuclear superpowers with innumerable moving parts where anything could go wrong in any instant. You don't get to push my species into extinction just because Rachel Maddow told you a scary bedtime story. You can f*** right off with that shit.

Every human being on earth should support Trump and Putin in de-escalating tensions between the US and Russia and want these two countries to get along. This has been the stupidest game of chicken that anyone has ever played, and it needs to end forever. If you have a problem with this, you need to get the f*** over yourself and go find some other way to masturbate your idiotic partisan loyalties. You hate Trump? Fine. You want to try and get him impeached? Fine. Do it some other way that doesn't involve risking the life of every organism on this planet.