Yesterday they did a story on Trump maybe being in the throes of dementia because he drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day<\/a>! They\u2019re bringing in psychologists, psychoanalysts, gastroenterologists, and then their own staff doctor, Sanjay Gupta. They\u2019re bringing all these people in and ignoring the terrorism story at the same time. During the break here I\u2019m watching Gloria Borger and some other woman and Brooke Baldwin, and they\u2019ve got these stern, serious looks on their faces as they\u2019re discussing the Trump tweet of Kirsten Gillibrand.<\/p>\nI\u2019m literally asking myself, “Do these people know what a joke they have become? Do they have any idea?” You know, one of the keys to media success is being able to empathize, being able to envision and understand — comprehend — how your audience sees you. You know the greatest example of this I can give you? These sports team mascots. Some of them are really good and some of them are not memorable at all. One of the best sports mascots in the history of mascots was the San Diego Chicken. Ted Giannoulas was the guy that was inside the suit. Right along with him was the Phillie Phanatic.<\/p>\n
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But of all the mascots that there are, how many of them can you literally name that have made an impact on you either comedically or any other way? Those two come to my mind. Maybe you can name others, but you can\u2019t name anywhere near all of them nor very many of them, and I maintain it\u2019s because of what I always thought about Giannoulas. You know, we had him in once when I was at the Kansas City Royals, and it was earth shattering because the Royals had never done anything like that.<\/p>\n
I mean, they were staid, button down. You promote baseball with baseball, not chickens. And we overcame that and we got the San Diego Chicken in there one day. It was a great hit. Everybody loved him. He was already widely known. He was showing up at baseball and football games. The San Diego Chicken was there at the Holy Roller, Raiders-Chargers game with Dave Casper. That\u2019s how far back he goes. But I always maintain… I try to analyze, “Why are people who do what they do successful and other people who do what they do it are not?” In the case of Ted Giannoulas — and I told him this.<\/p>\n
I said, “I think you have an innate sense of how you are seen in that suit. You, in other words, bring a consciousness and an alive factor to that character, that chicken suit that you\u2019re wearing. You\u2019re not just putting on a suit and running around waving your arms and chatting with referees. You have an innate sense,” and I don\u2019t think these people at CNN do. I think they\u2019re sitting there on their panel and they\u2019re wringing their hands and they\u2019re deathly serious about Trump\u2019s tweet of Kirsten Gillibrand and they\u2019re going on and on about, “It\u2019s the most outrageous thing that\u2019s ever happened in politics and Trump just keeps lowering the bar!”<\/p>\n
And you just sit there and laugh at it because you know that it\u2019s just the latest in a long line of, “Oh, my God, we\u2019re so offended; we can\u2019t believe it” stories that they\u2019re not selling. They may be selling them to, you know, 20\/30% of their core audience, other demented leftists. But in terms of growing their audience, building their audience, establishing credibility and believability as journalists outside their core base, they don\u2019t have a prayer. They\u2019re not even close. They\u2019re still lagging along in third place.<\/p>\n
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I think one of the factors is they have no idea how they\u2019re seen, and when you imagine yourself to be deathly serious about what you do, when you can\u2019t tell that people are laughing at you, you have a problem. Now, if you\u2019re trying to make people laugh at you and they\u2019re laughing, you\u2019re succeeding. But if you\u2019re sitting there thinking you\u2019re the incarnation of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and you are there to bring down the powerful and you\u2019ve got the goods and you\u2019re deadly serious about it?<\/p>\n
And you can\u2019t tell that people don\u2019t believe you anymore? You can\u2019t tell people are laughing at you? You can\u2019t detect that people are making jokes about? You\u2019ve got a problem, and I think that\u2019s where CNN is. Just by looking at stern, serious faces — just as stern and just as serious and just as excited as they were last Friday when they had another bogus story that was fully fraudulent, made up, and filled with lies. And there they were, deadly serious. It was the end of Trump. It might have been the end of the world if CNN had not discovered it.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s another thing: People who think they are so damned important that nobody can get along without \u2019em, that they\u2019re so special. That\u2019s how these people in journalism see themselves. It doesn\u2019t help that they\u2019ve got constitutional acknowledgment in the First Amendment. But they\u2019ve lost themselves. They have lost all… I don\u2019t think it\u2019s just CNN. The press briefing when Sarah Huckabee Sanders is openly mocking them and telling them what-for, they haven\u2019t slightest idea how they look to people watching them.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: I mentioned Jim Acosta. There were fireworks in the pressroom yesterday at the White House because Sarah Huckabee Sanders went to these people, primarily at CNN, and said (paraphrasing), “Look, you guys, it\u2019s one thing to get a story wrong. It\u2019s another thing to not correct it when you get it wrong. It\u2019s another thing to not care that it\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s another thing when you\u2019re purposely misinforming the American people.” And of course they blew up and said she is challenging our legitimacy, she\u2019s challenging us as journalists and so forth. <\/p>\n
And she, talk about courageous, you talk about somebody not a wallflower, somebody\u2019s not an innocent, harmless, fragile little snowflake, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She doesn\u2019t take one ounce of grief from these media bullies. In fact, they think she\u2019s the bully. He-he-he-he-he. Anyway, this afternoon on Wolf Blitzed, senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta slowly losing his mind in this job now about what happened to him this morning at the White House prior to his asking a question of Donald Trump during an event there.<\/p>\n
ACOSTA: Sarah Huckabee Sanders pulled me aside. Uh, this was prior to me asking that question to the president, and she warned me that if I asked the president a question at this “pool spray,” as we call them, that she could not promise that I would be allowed into a pool spray again. Uh, Wolf, this was a — a — a direct threat coming from the press secretary, uh, to me, warning me not to ask a question. And of course I went ahead and asked the question anyway and the president did not respond. But, Wolf, uh, as you know, we don\u2019t respond to threats. Uh, we\u2019re not going to be intimidated. But that did happen prior to my asking that question of the president.<\/p>\n
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CNN has humiliated itself at least seven times this year. They\u2019ve had to fire three people over a fake story about Anthony Scaramucci. The thing that happened on Friday would have been enough to get most people involved in it fired and drummed out of the business! It was such a violation of every canon of journalism. And then there have been a number of other stories that they have just been dead wrong on or where they have altered 911 tapes like NBC did during the episode with Trayvon Martin.<\/p>\n