Every now and then, a conservative will say of CNN: “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” I don’t buy this line of thinking, because the word “broken” would imply that CNN was once functional. It wasn’t.
Since day one, Ted Turner’s baby functioned exactly as intended. It was a spin machine built to subvert the overall zeitgeist of the Reagan era. Reagan became Bus, Bush became Clinton, etc, but the mission never changed. The slant, the 24-hour bias, was baked into the network’s very DNA. CNN was, and is, what it is.