Does The "C" In CNN Stand For Coon?

My morning workday rituals include catching up on all the news overnight.  At some time around four in the morning I will start my day with the television on in the background.  I will start with the CBS national news.  I then will switch to the ABC national news to get their version of whatever somebody says is the top news for the day.  I then switch back to the CBS affiliate to get the local news.  And I wrap it all up with CNN, the most trusted name in news.  MSNBC with Joe Scarborough is not an option.  And FOX News is anything but news.  While the others get about thirty minutes apiece, CNN can benefit from as much as ninety minutes of my time.

For the past couple of months or so, with just about every break for commercials, CNN, the most trusted name in news, has been peppering their broadcasts with advertisements for their head coon as farce, D. L. Hughley.  CNN wants to capitalize on the trend for young people to get their news through comedy shows like the Daily Show with Jon Steward and the Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert.  In order to exploit this development, CNN has put its effort for comedy news behind Mr. Hughley.  And what a choice it is.  It ranks right up there with Arizona Senator John McCain choosing the infamous Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  One of the advertisements for the program shows Mr. Hughley with his hand up as if trying to slow one of his guests down during one of his sure to be far from in depth interviews and saying something like, “Come on, man.  I barely know how to read.  I’ve got a G.E.D.”

Mr. Hughley is first to admit that he has no love of news, politics, current events.  He is quick to complain about the rigor of reading newspapers and web sites, listening to the radio talk shows, and watching his own network’s number one product, the anchored news broadcast.  And this is the man CNN wants to represent their foray into satirical news.  Mr. Hughley is about as qualified to be a network news anchor as Rush Limbaugh is qualified to be an advocate of affirmative action.

And speaking of affirmative action, it should be obvious to anyone with or without working vision balls that Mr. Hughley is a classic example of an unqualified black man benefitting from seriously unfair favorable treatment.  The last time I had anything to say about this man who will do anything to ingratiate himself to anyone willing to pay good money to see him lick boots, he was doing his best to bring attention to himself by telling black people to get over themselves and leave Don Imus alone.  Mr. Hughley was quick to add his less than helpful opinion and say, “There were some nappy headed women on the team and those are some of the ugliest women I have ever seen in my life.”  As a reward for being the epitome of the news media’s cheesing lawn jockey, Mr. Hughley is now given his own television show.

I must confess that I was tempted to tune into this show once.  During my morning ritual, an advertisement for the program showed an officious looking man calling Mr. Hughley a liar.  That piqued my curiosity for about a minute.  Early one Sunday morning, probably after the second or third airing of Mr. Hughley’s show, I found out that the officious guy calling the head coon as farce a liar was actually Josh Levs who appears regularly as part of CNN’s Truth Squad segment.  It turns out that Mr. Levs was planted on the scripted show and the liar accusation was nothing more than a gimmick.  The Sunday morning anchors were giving Mr. Levs a bit of teasing for being the victim of some colorful threats from Mr. Hughley.  I was glad that I never followed through on my curiosity.  I was disappointed in myself for being so easily duped into almost thinking of tuning into this travesty of comedy or of news.

Watching any other CNN program, no anchor, reporter, contributor, producer, cameraman, assistant, or anyone else affiliated with the news network would even think of promoting the fact that they didn’t have a degree, never mind never graduated from high school.  But there is no shame to Mr. Hughley’s lack of an education or lack of anything to credibly support him getting his own television show on CNN.  Stephen Colbert studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  Jon Stewart attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.  It took some searching but according to his linkedin.com web page Josh Levs attended Yale University.  But Mr. Hughley gets a pass with nothing more than a successful score on his general educational development test.

The Colbert Report is a 2008 winner of the George Foster Peabody Award which recognizes excellence in news and entertainment.  In 2008, the program also won an Emmy Award for outstanding writing for a variety, music, or comedy.  While I’d like to think that my opinion of anything is not influenced solely by the number of awards won or the caliber of such awards, for a comedy show to garner such recognition indicates a certain amount of sophistication and intelligent delivery in its development.

However, it would be no surprise to see Mr. Hughley’s show stoop to the sophomoric humor as fart jokes and put downs that are the staple of Mr. Hughley’s comedic talent.  What more can you expect from a man whose two cents to racially charged issues like a white man calling an organization of predominantly black women “There were some nappy headed women on the team and those are some of the ugliest women I have ever seen in my life.”  CNN might as well let Wolf Blitzer tell fart jokes in his opening monologue before he gives his “news” reports.