In an obnoxious and greatly misleading article published on Wednesday, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter championed former KHGI-TV producer Justin Simmons for quitting his job at a Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned ABC affiliate in Nebraska following the controversy of their scripted promise to be factual.
While Stelter tried to portray Simmons as a down-the-middle journalist standing up to corrupt conservative state propaganda, his subject has a long history steeped in the leftist anti-Trump resistance movement.
“A morning TV producer at a Sinclair-owned station in Nebraska has resigned in protest of what he calls the company's ‘obvious bias,’” Stelter hyped as he began his article. “Simmons told CNNMoney that he had been concerned about Sinclair's corporate mandates for the past year and a half, and that the promos were just the final straw.”
Stelter used the example of Simmons to proclaim:
Simmons' decision to quit is a dramatic example of the tensions that exist between Sinclair-owned newsrooms and the company's Maryland-based management. Staffers like Simmons feel that the conservative owners of Sinclair are interfering in local news coverage.
However, simple visit to Simmons’ Twitter page proves just how involved in liberal politics he actually is. Back in February, Simmons retweeted a factually dubious tweet by NPR claiming Trump signed a bill to allow the mentally ill to buy guns.
The Federalist’s James Hasson discovered that “[Simmons], who joined the station nearly four years ago, is heavily involved with a self-described ‘civil resistance movement’ called Democracy Spring.”
Democracy Spring, a play on the so-called “Muslim Spring”, said one of their “principles” is to “share a common story of moral urgency, progressive vision, and radical hope.” Their main cause is the liberal trope of trying to remove money from politics. According to them, “the problem” is:
American democracy is fundamentally broken. The corruption of big money in politics makes our representatives beholden to billionaires and corporations instead of everyday people, while widespread voter suppression is taking away millions of Americans' fundamental right to vote. Sweeping commonsense reforms could solve these problems.
And the group specifically targets the right, asserting “Republican politicians who fear being voted out of office use voter suppression laws to keep typically left-leaning populations away from the polls.”
Hasson also noted how he brought the issue of Simmons’ active role in liberal politics Stelter’s attention, yet “he continued to promote it on Twitter under a “In Case You Missed It” headline. He also omitted any of the relevant context in his nightly newsletter, published several hours after I called his attention to Simmons’ history as a left-wing activist.”
As of the publication of this blog, Stelter’s article has been up for over 24 hours and there has yet to be updated to inform readers of Simmons’ liberal biases. With the understanding of Simmons’ political agenda, his protest against Sinclair falls flat because of his obvious vendetta against conservatives. Of course, this is just another example of how CNN and Stelter’s desired for “truth and decency” are a farce.
