CNN Is Wallpaper in Europe Too

By Roger L Simon

I have been sitting in the Lufthansa Lounge at Frankfort Airport about six hours due to one of those travel semi-calamities that we all experience so frequently these days. Weather? Computers? Engine problems? What? Nobody seems to know, except that it’s crowded here in the lounge and food could be better.

Sheryl and I are en route from Nasvhille to Budapest and then Tel Aviv via Dulles, having left the day after the inauguration.

Here in Germany there has been a knifing, killing a two-year old, in a place called Aschaffenburg by an Afghan (motive, of course, “undetermined”) and in Tel Aviv another brutal multiple knifing by a Moroccan with American papers (motive all too obvious) who somehow slipped through the notoriously tight Israeli airport security. Of course back in Nashville there was a high school shooting..

There’s a reason “safe travels” has replaced “bon voyage” as the familiar good-bye greeting these days.

Both the above knifings are getting play on the two large TV screens in front of me, one tuned to Germany’s Die Welt and the other to CNN,

Even more coverage though is devoted to the latest doings of one Donald J. Trump. It should not surprise that our new president is being dealt with more sympathetically or at least more even-handedly, by the German network. CNN has endless palaver by Christiane Amanpour, the British-Iranian journalist who has been pouring snide vitriol on anything American, particularly if it is to the right of Trotsky, for decades, another case of if-you-hate-us-so-much-why-are-you-here.

This doesn’t matter too much inside the USA where audiences are deserting CNN only slightly slower than the speed of light, but in the rest of the world it is a different story. The airports, railroad stations and hotels, as well as cable networks, of countries across the globe feature CNN far more than any other American media outlet. The network maintains this by paying for airport placement and similar means. CNN International is generally more extreme than the domestic variety as well.

We worry about the anti-Americanism that has infiltrated the Voice of America and other government agencies, and Donald Trump will be expunging much of that soon if he hasn’t already, but CNN remains, a bastion of misinformation claiming everybody else is misinformation.—

The good news, however, is that, like us, they don’t seem to be paying much attention to the network. At least here at Frankfort Airport few seem to be actually looking at the giant screen. It’s just there like wallpaper. In fact, it’s rather extraordinary there is so little interest in this large lounge for Germany’s biggest airline.

Looked at it from the perspective of being a few thousand miles away, I still feel next door informationally. It’s not that different from home. I learn what is happening just as fast, my wife sitting next to me keeping me updated on the latest doings from her iPhone, J6 prisoners out, the Pentagon ordering troops to the Southern border, North Carolinian hurricane victims finally getting decent apartments, as I type. It’s clear that America is changing at a speed really resembling light and hugely for the better. It’s a massive feeling of relief, as if our country, and the fore the world, dodged a bullet at the last possible moment.

I can only roll my eyes at the news in the Daily Mail of troubles in that paradise of the Harris-Emhoff marriage. I had snarkily predicted to friends that it would only last nine months after the election.

While Sheryl and I were talking about the changes, a man, sitting across from us, i think he was Eastern European but he clearly understood English, stared at us unabashedly, wanting to hear what we were saying as if it were news from the front.

The whole world wants to know what’s happening in American now, but not from CNN… from us. America First is going to mean extraordinary global change. It’s happening before our eyes.

FROM BUDAPEST: It’s 7:30AM Hungary time and I’m typing this in our hotel bathroom while Sheryl sleeps. I was able to muster seven hours Ambien-induced hours I probably will pay for. But I awakened to more good news. Trump has declared the Houthis a terror organization. What else are they? But somehow the Bidenistas took them off the terror list where Trump had originally put them, didn’t even add them back after they spent years blocking shipping, kidnapping sailors and lobbing missiles willy-nilly at Israel. What were Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken thinking? I don’t even want to go there. Thank God these court eunuchs are gone. It’s a new day in America. And Budapest. See you later.

 

First published in American Refugees