"The Best Political Team on Television"? On election night, CNN runs its preposterous slogan into the ground.

By Jack Shafer
Slate.com

The more preposterous the advertising slogan, the greater the number of repetitions required to mallet the message into the audience's consciousness. On the day of the New Hampshire primaries, CNN informed its viewers more than 50 times that it fields "the best political team on television." The network's incessant self-hype didn't appear in on-air promos between news segments but during news programs.

Like a human tape loop, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer uttered the plug most frequently, but CNN's Kyra Phillips, Don Lemon, Collen McEdwards, Heidi Collins, Kiran Chetry, and John Roberts also chanted it to the camera like an incantation. No CNN broadcaster cited an authority that had deemed its team the best. None pointed to having won the most broadcast journalism awards or having received a J.D. Power and Associates survey supporting the boast. If they had quoted some metric, their assertion could be falsified. Instead, the broadcasters alleged their network's bestness as fact, again and again, like grinning soap salesmen reading from cue cards—which I assume they were.

Now, it's one thing for a station in a bush-league television market to proclaim itself the "region's news leader." Little harm is done because so few are insulted. But when a major network flings such a load of humbug on a day of peak viewership, the damage is palpable.

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