In a time of crisis, CNN turns to a real expert in crisis management: Sean Penn

Sean Penn has always been an odd bird. He’s a very talented actor who, in common with Hollywood’s other leftists,  has an affinity for dictators. No one should forget how he cuddled up to Hugo Chavez, the dictator who set Venezuela on its socialist path. However, to his credit, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Penn did rouse himself to help with the relief effort and seems to have made a difference.

Haiti aside, Penn is not a very serious or even a very coherent person. Nevertheless, as part of its town hall on coronavirus, which Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta hosted, CNN invited Sean Penn to talk about how the federal government should handle the virus. The preceding sentence is not from The Babylon Bee. It’s the truth. Penn is now a pandemic expert.

If you go to CNN’s website, you can see the segment in which Penn speaks fondly of the aide the military provided, and he deserves credit for showing respect to our military. If you don’t want to go to CNN’s website, though, here’s just a snippet:

Without stepping on Penn’s narrative about how the military can indeed be an important factor in providing humanitarian aid, the mere fact that CNN had him on reveals how fundamentally unserious CNN is. Part of the problem is the nature of 24-hour television. In the best of times, it can be hard to find enough news to fill all the available airtime.

In the worst of times, it’s even harder. One would think that the coronavirus would provide unending sources of material, but the reverse is true. Because much of the world – or at least those parts of the world that generate news of interest to the media -- have shut down, there’s not much happening. It’s all coronavirus all the time, and there’s only so much that can be said or written about the virus based upon the available evidence.

CNN, in common with other media outlets, is desperate for something, anything, to fill its many voids. And so it turns to an erratic, eccentric, hard-Left, intellectually undeveloped actor to provide instruction about coping in a pandemic. This is fundamentally unserious.

If CNN were serious, it wouldn’t be interviewing Sean Penn or attacking President Trump for calling a disease by a correct name. Instead, it would provide people with rational information about the world in which they live. This information would include not just fomenting panic and hysteria – always with side attacks on President Trump – but would also talk about things that are equally important and interesting.

For example, instead of parroting the Chinese government’s party line about its heroic actions dealing with the epidemic, which is useful for attacking Trump, CNN could discuss how China deliberately hid coronavirus from view so as not to impair its image. China went public only when it could no longer hide that its lifestyle habits (eating bizarre animals), its hygiene problems (China is dirty), and its failed medical system (socialized, of course), had unleashed a dragon on the world.

Reporting accurately about China would help the world react rationally when the pandemic ends (and it will, sooner rather than later). There should be an informed decision about whether the world should continue to treat China -- which is the world’s biggest polluter, a grasping imperial power, a domestic tyrant, and a fast-growing military force -- with the respect it has had to date.

What’s happening now tells us China needs to be brought to heel, but that’s not what CNN is reporting. It’s too busy interviewing noted pandemic expert Sean Penn.

CNN could also talk to experts who believe that the panic is overblown. As noted above, China has systemic problems.

So does Italy: Hundreds of thousands of Silk Road workers from China rotate in and out of Northern Italy, which means huge numbers of infected workers having been bringing coronavirus there for months. Italy also has an elderly population and, as with China, has crippling socialized medicine, terrible pollution, and heavy cigarette usage.

The same is true for Iran. The only difference is that it has a younger population, although it’s stricken leadership is antique.

These things, though, don’t interest CNN. Filling airtime and attacking Trump are its bottom line goals. No wonder Sean Penn is now one of its go-to experts. The mainstream media are corrupt, and they are disgusting.

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