Everyone's laughing at you, CNN

Stephen Colbert's audience thinks CNN is a big joke

“I know you guys are objective over there,” says Stephen Colbert to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, and already you can hear the audience struggling to keep it together. And then he says: “You just report the news as it is.”

Big laugh from the audience.

“Was that supposed to be a laugh line?” asks Collins, offended but understanding that any attempt to prove her network’s integrity as a journalistic outlet would only lead to more laughter.

“It wasn’t supposed to be,” responds Colbert, “but I guess it is…” And a once-great Colbert would have understood what his audience clearly got: that CNN, along with Fox News, the New York Times, and all the others, is a corporation focused on maximizing profits and spewing whatever propaganda it needs in order to do so.

And Collins’ reaction shows that the pundits over at CNN also understand that their grasp over public consciousness is slipping. That they can no longer feign gravitas and principles, but are instead degraded to attacking other outlets and crying misinformation at every turn.

So Katie and Aaron turned on CNN to test this hypothesis, and the first thing they saw confirmed it. Kasie Hunt, pictured with Collins above (Jake Tapper doesn’t appear in this Throwdown, but I couldn’t resist putting his shocked face in front of the painted laughers), used her CNN show in the wake of Trump’s weird X chat with Elon Musk to proclaim that “X has turned into a haven for the spread of misinformation.”

Sure, Musk and Trump themselves tell many lies, but for CNN to claim that the entire platform is a haven for misinformation is a projection so obvious that we just wish Colbert’s audience had been there to laugh her off the set.

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