‘The Crowds Are Back’: CNN Promotes New Year’s Eve Special, Despite Months of Warning Viewers Against Crowds

Ken MeyerDec 16th, 2021, 2:01 pm
 

CNN has started to promote its grand New Year’s Eve show with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, but a new promotional campaign strikes an odd tone given the surge in Covid cases nationwide and the network’s editorial stance on the pandemic.

The network posted a video on Thursday, featuring shows from past years, along with the caption: “The crowds are back and so are we!”

A number of viewers responded to the tweet, accusing the network of being tone deaf for encouraging crowds during the pandemic — an odd tone, given the network has frequently featured pundits warning against large crowds.

On top of that, according to CNN’s own reporting Covid is surging in the United States. John King led Inside Politics on Thursday by noting that case numbers are on the rise, causing a “sudden wave of major disruption” on multiple fronts. Senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen followed up by noting that even though Omicron appears less likely to cause severe illness, there are still plenty of unknowns to the variant, and it appears to surpass the Delta variant in contagiousness. She did explain, however, that even if vaccines and boosters can’t prevent Omicron infections, they can still help protect from the worst of it.

The segment continued with King pulling up a map on CNN’s “magic board” and looking at where cases numbers are climbing fastest around the country. He also noted that “hospitalizations are up” right now, with 70,000 Americans being treated when the number was 47,000 a month ago.

If CNN goes ahead with their usual New Years’ show, headquartered in New York, they’ll have to contend with the fact that Covid positivity rates have been trending upwards there since mid-October.

As of writing, the city’s Covid positivity rate doubled in the last 3 days.

Watch above, via CNN.

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