WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2026
The fruit of Ted Turner's idea: At the time, it seemed like a good idea.
We'd have 24-hour TV news! Cable news would be available all the time! What in the world could go wrong?
It was the late Ted Turner's idea. CNN appeared on cable screens on June 1, 1980.
In 1982, along came Headline News, "a sister network to CNN that broadcast a looping, half-hour cycle of segments covering various news topics."
In the long run, it turned out that we the people didn't want a round-the-clock, half-hour digest of major news. Today, the channel is called HLN—and this is its current profile:
HLN (TV network)
HLN is an American basic cable network. Owned by CNN Worldwide, the network primarily carries true-crime programming, recently drifting away from limited live news programming.
[...]
In 2005, HLN began to...air more personality-based programs, including a primetime block featuring pundits such as Glenn Beck and legal commentator Nancy Grace. In the mid-2010s, HLN repositioned itself as a social media-centric network, highlighting headlines popular on social networks, and introducing social media-themed shows. Under CNN president Jeff Zucker, the channel began to backpedal on this programming in 2016, gradually shifting to a focus on crime, "regional" headlines, and entertainment stories (in contrast to CNN's current focus on politics) during its daytime programming, with true crime programs airing at all other times.
Entertainment stories, but also true crime!
In fairness, it's also true that the History Channel is now said by eggheads to be built around "pseudo-documentaries and pseudoscientific, unsubstantiated, sensational investigative programming."
(Bravo, originally designed as the fine arts channel, is now Real Housewives pretty much right down the line.)
So many projects have changed! But 24-hour news is still with us, or at least imitations of same. And as "the democratization of media" spread, new subgroups took root in the soil.
As new platforms appeared, these subgroups took root. That brings us to the members of one such subgroup who were sent on a stage last Thursday night to offer an hour of "news:"
Gutfeld!, May 21, 2026
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
Sherrod Small: comedian
Greg Gutfeld: host
Jim Florentine: comedian
Tyrus: comedian, former "wrestler"
They would serve as the news analysts for this hour-long "cable news" program.
With the possible exception of Small, they were wholly reliable members of one of our flailing nation's hardened cable news subgroups. On this night, they would start by pretending to tackle this topic:
Did the Cambridge city council make a mistake in ending the SpotShotter program?
That was the policy topic these tools would pretend to discuss. The pseudo-discussion started with an overview of the situation, fashioned as a "monologue" by the host.
In yesterday's report, we laid out some of the basics about the topic at hand. We drew our information from the two news reports the host would soon cite—news reports by Boston.com and the Harvard Crimson about the decision the council had made the previous Monday night.
Should the council have ended their city's use of the ShotSpotter program? Based on the limited information available, we ourselves can't state a firm view.
The program's host was at no such disadvantage. At the start of his monologue, he played brief video clips of two (2) Cambridge residents stating their views to the council that night—two people, out of the "more than thirty" who had spoken that night.
Then, the host began to offer his view of the situation. Luckily, Ted Turner was no longer able to see the way the host pretended to argue what he pretended to be his case.
He started with a comment about BIPOCs whose meaning, in context, we still don't understand. But as he continued, it wasn't hard to discern his displeasure with what the council had done.
We'll highlight his key points. Videotape of the segment starts here:
GUTFELD (5/21/26): Who knew BIPOC were such gangsters?
Who are these fruitcakes? Who put these laid-off carnival workers in charge? The danger these idiots lecture us about isn't the ones outside their home—the bullets, the guns, the criminals. They harm the same community these [BLEEPS] claim to protect. Luckily for these morons, a bullet to the head won't make them any dumber.
That's how the analyst started—but who were the fruitcakes in question? Was he talking about the members of the Cambridge city council? Or was he talking about the two Cambridge residents we'd seen on our cable news screens?
(For the record, the host had referred to those people as "activists." One of the two seemed to be a high school aged kid who, like the other "activist," could hardly have been more courteous or more composed.)
To whom was the host referring when he started his news analysis? Who were the "fruitcakes / idiots / carnival workers" to whom he now referred?
It wasn't clear who the fruitcakes were. But the studio audience enjoyed a good laugh when the analyst said how dumb these "morons" were.
Now, he played tape of two more Cambridge residents addressing the council. Then it was back to this:
GUTFELD: So once again, these creeps aren't concerned citizens. They aren't at-risk families ducking from gunfire, putting cages on their windows. No, they're far removed from reality of any daily life. They live in their heads.
How did the host know such things about this pair of "creeps?" He made no attempt to say—but the exercise in name-calling continued:
GUTFELD: They're professional, entitled arrogant activists whose destructive nature would rather put others at risk. Safety is not the goal, feeling superior is.
It still wasn't clear who he was describing—the four citizens we had now seen, or the nine city council members. Nor was it clear how the host could know so much about the intentions and motives of the arrogant activists he was now describing.
That said, the host was working from a familiar script—a script about the extremely bad values of anyone said to be "on the left."
With apologies, one of his favorite insults emerged before he finished his presentation. After describing a violent gunman, he proceeded to offer this:
GUTFELD: That's who these smug narcissists are protecting by trying to ban something that helps actual people, not phonies like them...
According to these douchebags, the real victim isn't the person dodging gunfire, it's the fictional over-policed.
Whoever he was talking about, they weren't just fruitcake and phonies. As it now turned out, they were douchebags too!
Is this the fruit of Ted Turner's idea? With apologies, the program's host soon placed this astonishing bit of swill atop his growing pile:
GUTFELD: And this insanity spreads to other Blue cities. Mayor Brandon Johnson got rid of the system, despite Chicago being responsible for more coffin sales than a coffin saleswoman with big tits.
Yes, he actually said that. His analysis ended like this:
GUTFELD: Effectiveness doesn't matter. ShotSpotter could be 100% effective and they'd call it racist.
The fact is, they aren't happy that murderers are being stopped. They're mad that most of the murderers aren't white. And the people paying the price aren't these city council dopes, it's the people who are getting shot. And for them, getting shot is the least of their problems. It's these gasbags bent on making sure that they do.
So ended this furious person's latest imitation of human life. He started with fruitcakes and he ended with gasbags, having made many stops in between.
On the other hand, he had presented virtually none of the information found in the two news reports which had flashed on the screen. Instead, he had delivered a string of insults, along with a deranged reference to "a coffin saleswoman" he described in a typical way.
At the time, cable news had seemed like a good idea! Eventually, a corporate group decided to pay this person $9 million per year to sell their political messaging in this deranged way—and when he threw to the lady on his panel, she took the baton and she ran:
COMPAGNO: In one scenario that these freaks are putting forth, it's all potential. It's all hypothetical. The potential for over-surveillance. The potential for BIPOCs to be harmed, the potential for somehow our conversations to be picked up.
She was discussing a bunch of "freaks." As she continued, she brought the super-inanity in:
COMPAGNO (continuing directly): That's not what this is. As you pointed out, any type of noise that has been mistaken for gunfire sounds really close to it, like a car backfiring and like fireworks. We're not talking about Jerry Nadler's farts.
Yes, that's what she said.
For the record, the news reports had seemed to say that ShotSpotter's reports of gunshots were wrong 65% of the time. That apparent claim went unmentioned by the analysts on this show.
As she continued, Compagno soon heightened the earlier insult:
COMPAGNO: But now, because this is being removed, these white BIPOC carnival freaks will render more dangerous, and more hurt, all of these people that they pretend [to care about].
At this site, we have no idea what a "white BIPOC" is. But Compagno had heightened her original insult now, rendering the "freaks" in question as a bunch of "carnival freaks."
Other panelists played by similar rules. When it came time for Tyrus to speak, he instantly derided the four Cambridge citizens who had now been seen on tape as "the weirdest, gayest-looking white people" around.
As he continued, he offered a bit of advice regarding the "narcissism" of the weird, gay-looking people who spoke against ShotSpotter:
TYRUS: Nobody cares about how painful your nose ring is, or the fact that your mom didn't put anything on your card.
No one was wearing a nose ring that night, but this program's bloated blowhard was on a bit of a roll. For his part, Florentine offered an ugly idea about why a person might have said that ShotSpotter wasn't helpful:
FLORENTINE: Most mass shooters are white. So they're OK with a white person going into a neighborhood with a lot of minorities and shooting them up and giving them a head start.
