Something extraordinary happened yesterday: CNN's fact-checkers called out lies by Democrat Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and Veronica Escobar, twofer victim class members as female and minorities. Compounding the shock, the lies were about President Trump and aimed at impeaching the m-----------, as their Democrat colleague Rashida Tlaib put it so memorably following her election.

Bronson Stocking of Townhall noticed the break with CNN's existing editorial orientation:

In order to impeach the president, Democrats have to lie about the facts. It has now come to the point where even CNN is calling the Democrats out on their lies. Two Democratic representatives from Texas, Veronica Escobar and Sheila Jackson Lee, both lied during debate on articles of impeachment on Thursday about what President Trump said during his phone call to the president of Ukraine. Rep. Escobar said President Trump told President Zelensky, "I want you to do me a favor though." Rep. Jackson Lee quoted Trump saying, "I would like you to do a favor though." What Trump actually said was "I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot." The full quote makes it clear that Trump was asking the president of Ukraine to do "our country" a favor.

Keep in mind that CNN has meticulously kept its viewers ignorant of most things that would cast an unfavorable light on the efforts to impeach (or even say something positive about) President Trump. The network did not carry I.G. Horowitz's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, for instance.

So this bit of fact-checking is worth noticing, even if it didn't happen on air, but rather in CNN's online fact check:

President Trump alleged that Democratic Reps. Veronica Escobar and Sheila Jackson Lee "purposely misquoted" his call with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in a Tweet this morning. Facts First: Trump is correct that the call was misquoted during today's debate over the articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary committee. In the declassified memo of the July 25 phone call between Trump and President Zelensky, the President says, "I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot." During the debate over impeachment articles, Rep. Escobar, using an analogy to stress the alleged problem in Trump's phone call with Zelensky, said "I want you to do me a favor though." This quote replaces the word "us" found in the memo on the call, with the word "me." Rep. Jackson, when quoting the memo of the call, said that the quote was "I would like you to do a favor though" — removing "us" from the quote. As the President tweeted this, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan was making the same points at the hearing. Last week, Professor Pamela Karlan argued that Trump was using the "royal we" in that sentence and actually asking for a personal favor. But Republicans and Trump have repeatedly claimed the President was asking for a favor for the national interest instead.

Are CNN management finally starting to realize they are committing slow-motion suicide with their biased news coverage? Implicitly, the network has been counting on impeachment coverage to lift its ratings out the cellar. It isn't working out that way, but rather exactly the opposite.



CNN HQ in Atlanta (photo credit: Josh Hallett).

John Nolte of Breitbart:

Besides visceral hate for Donald Trump, one of the reasons CNN has been so openly aggressive in cheerleading for Trump's impeachment is to boost its pathetic ratings. Well, like everything else CNNLOL chief Jeff Zucker touches, that plan has also failed because the far-left outlet's ratings took a double-digit nosedive last week. While this is a slight improvement over the previous week, when CNNLOL hit a three-year ratings low, CNN is still unable to attract even a million viewers during its dreadful primetime schedule. Compared to this same week last year, CNNLOL lost 14 percent of its primetime viewers and 15 percent of its total day viewers. During primetime, the fake news outlet was only able to attract — in a county of 330 million where 88 million households have access to CNN — a pathetic, measly, humiliating 887,000 viewers. Throughout the day, the conspiracy-theory outlet was only able to attract a pathetic, measly, humiliating 689,000 viewers. America's other left-wing cable outlet, MSNBC, also lost viewers. A full 12 percent in primetime and five percent in total day … while the president of the United States is being impeached!

Both CNN and MSNBC have large corporate parents to whom their financial results are not material. But AT&T (CNN's parent) and Comcast-Universal (MSNBC's owner) do have lots of regulated business lines and also are vulnerable to consumer boycotts. As impeachment inevitably crashes and burns, these two networks will find themselves progressively (pun intended) discredited, and even possibly legally implicated in the propagation of the phony Steele dossier.

I acknowledge that fact-checking online is a baby step in the road to responsibility. But it is better than no step and may indicate rumblings of change.