Watch: Desperate CNN Forces Children to Talk Politics, Gets Brutal Answers About Trump and Kamala
CNN is supposed to be a serious network. I know, do try to stifle your laughter, but they put themselves forward as the most trusted name in news. That’s not just me talking, that’s actually their slogan.
Likewise, Anderson Cooper is supposed to be one of the network’s most serious reporters. CNN backers, I’ll concede that this is true if CNN supporters will concede that this is a low bar to clear, considering this is a network which employed Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo as on-air talent — hosting back to back shows in prime time, no less! — up until pretty recently.
Nevertheless, Cooper has cemented his reportorial bona fides by traveling to war zones and humanitarian hellscapes; those who remember the unspeakable tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina likely remember a teary Cooper standing in the floodwaters amid the calamitous suffering.
He now reports mostly from the studio, of course, but there’s another potentially major storm making landfall this week: Hurricane Helene, which made landfall Thursday as a Category 4 storm and “the strongest hurricane on record to slam into Florida’s Big Bend,” according to CNN.
So, what was Anderson Cooper spending his airtime on Wednesday night talking about? Naturally, what 10- and 11-year-olds thought about the two major party presidential nominees, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.
I doubt this was Anderson’s idea, but Cooper, ever a professional, billed it as a “special report” into “what the voters of tomorrow make of the campaign today,” according to a CNN transcript.
Cooper said that his show “teamed up with a renowned political scientist from Stanford and a psychologist at Arizona State University to design and conduct a study looking at polarization among fourth graders.” He was able to keep a straight face while he said that, which is ironic when you consider his past on-air giggle meltdowns when faced with patently ridiculous material. (My personal favorite is when he reported on French actor Gerard Depardieu relieving himself in an area that was, um, decidedly not the bathroom on an airline flight, but we all have our preferences in this department.)
“Our experts asked us to find three schools, one from a town that went heavily for President Biden in the last election, one that went big for former President Trump in 2020, and one in an area about evenly split,” Cooper said at the outset of the almost ten-minute (!) segment regarding what the nation’s fourth- and fifth-graders thought about the Harris-Trump matchup.
Spoiler alert: nothing of actual value, even if they were brutally honest!
Here’s a clip that could basically stand in for virtually any interaction CNN’s people had with these kids:
CNN: What’s the first word that pops into you head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?
Child 1: Liar.
CNN: What’s the word that pops into you head when you hear the name Donald Trump?
Child 2: Pure evil.
CNN: Which one do you think is more selfish?
Child 3: Probably Kamala… pic.twitter.com/ppQEqrU6TL
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 26, 2024
Do you know what these kids had to say of use during the — I cannot emphasize this part enough — nine-and-a-half minute segment? Nothing! Because they’re kids!
These middle-schoolers are at least seven years away from voting. Less than seven years ago, I can guarantee, their parents were sticking plastic protectors in wall sockets so these rugrats didn’t get electrocuted because they stuck a fork in there for kicks.
If you are closer to being protected from self-electrocution than you are to voting, what you have to say about the presidential election doesn’t matter. Now write that 100 times on the chalkboard. Or your iPad, whatever you’re using these days.
But then again, the issue isn’t with the kids. It’s not that girl’s fault for saying that Harris is more selfish “because girls are a little bit dramatic sometimes.” Later in the interview, a boy said that he didn’t like Trump because “I mean, come on, he went to like jail, I mean.”
Cooper had to add this in a voice-over: “To be clear, while Trump was booked and released from jail, he didn’t spend time behind bars. Thirty-two percent of all students brought up the former president’s legal issues. In general, kids who said they’d support Donald Trump did not see his legal problems as a disqualifier.”
Oh, let’s get Gallup on the line, folks. The “Minecraft” demographic has weighed in on how much Trump’s court cases matter in this election, and we need to weight the polls accordingly.
Keep in mind that this slice of indoctrination was presented, entirely po-faced, by Cooper and his team. It wasn’t treated like the Depardieu urination segment, which was part of what Cooper called the “Ridiculist.” (A list of all newsworthy things ridiculous, in case you didn’t get it.)
Instead, this was ten minutes given over, in quite serious tones, to the opinions of kids who will have less influence over this election than their dead great-great-grandfather, at least if their great-great-grandfather was registered to vote in Chicago. (I’m sure he’s still voting reliably Democrat. Allegedly, cough, cough.)
Why not extrapolate this method of sampling to other fields? Before the influential film publication Sight and Sound releases its next list of top 10 films of all time, as it does every decade, why not have 10- and 11-year-olds watch the top two American-produced films on the list — Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” — and then the 1991 film “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze.” (You know, the one with the Vanilla Ice cameo, where he delivers the song “Ninja Rap.”)
Send a 10-minute clip of what the kids thought about those three films to the folks at Sight and Sound. Then see what they think. Will “TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze” somehow replace Hitchock and Welles atop the list of American-produced films? No. Is the fact that someone tried farcical on its face? Yes.
This may be an example of reductio ad absurdum, but I didn’t have to reductio very much here. These kids are parroting their parents, teachers, TV and social media at best, and perhaps (unfortunately) not exactly in that order.
All sorts of reasons were given to justify turning over significant network time to this piffle — but the actual meaning, such as there was one, was to try and drum up some new angle on this election by bringing children into the mix. And guess what? They were ill-informed. Which is why we don’t give the vote to 11-year-olds.
Thanks for elucidating why they don’t have the vote yet again, Anderson Cooper and Co., for those of us who have forgotten. Now, if you don’t mind, I hear there’s an actual hurricane going on. You seem to have real experience in that, as opposed to how child psychology and sit-down discussions might yield some light on this election or elections in the future.
How about focusing on the storm and leaving the kids to their parents, instead? Just a thought, Anderson.
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