CNN FAILS TO GRASP SOCIAL MEDIA, suspending reporter Elise Labott for two weeks for editorializing “House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees. Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish,” in a tweet, Ed Morrissey writes:

A two-week suspension isn’t going to convince anyone that CNN reporters (or any reporters) are robots without their own biases and opinions. If anything, it’s better for consumers to have those out in the open. Media bias was obvious long before Elise Labott hit Twitter, and suspending her over this tweet isn’t going to convince anyone that it’s been cured, at CNN or anywhere else.

In fact, that is one of the merits of social-media interaction — so that consumers can interact with and get to know reporters. CNN obviously values that promotional value, or they’d order Labott and other reporters off of Twitter and Facebook altogether. If reporters do nothing but tweet headlines, there would be no value to their engagement at all; CNN tweets headlines all day long, and people can find links there if that’s all they want.

CNN is apparently still clinging to the notion of “objectivity” like one of the legendary stories of Japanese soldiers stranded on desert islands and still claiming allegiance to the emperor long after the war had ended. “Objectivity” was a fable the MSM needed to promote during the early days of the original national broadcast networks, first radio in the 1920s, and TV after World War II, to convince the American public — and the FCC — that it was delivering a neutral product that appealed to the largest possible audience. (A premise the MSM regularly broke with impunity, of course.) Building a national broadcasting network was staggeringly expensive, which is why for decades TV channel choices were so limited; today, anyone can start a Website with just a few clicks of a computer mouse.

In the 1980s, CNN broke the big three TV networks’ logjam on the news. Perhaps its current management might join the rest of us in the 21st century someday.

Of course, Labbott’s suspension raises another question for CNN viewers: if the network is going to continue to pretend to be “objective,” then why do all their reporters’ Kinsley-esque gaffes keep occurring from the left?