I was delighted to see that CNN’s poor performance has led to its parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, losing over 50% of its stock value in the past year. I think I know why.
On April 7, 2023, my wife Lucy and two daughters Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, were brutally murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in the Jordan Valley. Three days later on her TV show, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour referred to the murder as a “shoot-out," implying that my girls were firing at the Palestinians, and not murdered in cold blood. Apparently, the evil of CNN’s misreporting knows no bounds.
At the time, I wrote an open letter to David Zaslav, CEO of CNN’s parent companyWarner Brothers Discovery, reminding him that Warner Brothers was the only studio in Hollywood before the Holocaust that made anti-Nazi films, and asking whether it was now taking on the role of Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s key propagandist? Needless to say, there was no official response from Mr. Zaslav, although he did dismiss the CEO of CNN just days after my letter was published.
Meanwhile, CNN continues to be the mouthpiece for Islamic terror against Israel. On August 10, 2024, a headline read: “More than 90 Palestinians killed in Israeli strike on school and mosque sheltering displaced people, Gaza officials say.” This news was issued within minutes of an Israeli strike against terrorists sheltering in a Gaza school. Though the IDF said it used precision missiles to hit the command rooms housing the terrorists, and that there was no major damage to the surrounding school compound, CNN immediately accepted the word of a known terror organization on the numbers and identities of the dead, despite the fact that Hamas are known to consistently lie about these facts.
Any intelligent viewer would realize that an honest assessment of the casualties would not be possible for days after such an attack. The sole purpose of such a headline is therefore to create even more Jew-hatred in the US, where the 2% Jewish population is already experiencing over 80% of all religious hate crimes in the country. CNN is clearly a propagator of antisemitic fake news.
The Talmud explains that the difference between truth and “fake news” depends on the context. When we are given the “whole picture," it brings us closer to the truth. When sensational headlines pick out one detail, we are usually in the territory of fake news, even if it transpires that the detail was accurate.
The problem with most legacy media companies is that they are usually controlled by one editor-in-chief who sets the tone of the content of that channel. His or her biases will drive the political leaning of the content. In an increasingly politically polarized world, legacy media has thus become the greatest provider of fake news.
Fortunately, as we learn from the Torah, humans were made in the image of God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (right and wrong) in the Garden of Eden. This gave us all the inherent ability to identify fake news, even if our drives do not always allow us to refrain from viewing it. In fact, in a Gallup poll from October 2023, 39% of Americans said that they don’t trust the media at all.
This explains why people are increasingly searching for truth in multiple locations, whether from social media, new media channels, or conversations with other humans. We are no longer trusting the biased editors of TV news or mainstream newspapers for our “daily dose of truth."
A June 2024 report by MoffettNathanson Research states that the profits of the top six US legacy media companies (Walt Disney, NBC Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, Fox Corp and ABC Networks) have halved in the past five years.
The collapse of CNN is a step forward for truth. Let’s hope that the stampede of viewers away from these biased news sources continues, and the search for truth prevails. If so, we should see an increasing interest in Torah study, the ultimate source of our Truth.
- Rabbi Leo Dee is an educator living in Efrat. His book, “Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity,” was republished in English and Hebrew in memory of his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, who were murdered by terrorists in April 2023.