PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

CNN’s Brian Stelter kicked off Sunday’s edition of Reliable Sources with the usual foot-stomping editorial. He asked “what is the cost of lies?” Stelter noted that those were the first words of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which dramatized the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, a year after Stelter was born. After describing “secrecy, state deception, and endemic lying” as the main themes, Stelter proceeded to compare the Soviet Union to Trump’s America.

CNN’s Stelter Compares Trump’s America to Soviet Union: ‘What is the Cost of Lies?’, NewsBusters, today.

Chaser:

“If suddenly a true, two-party or multi-party system were to be formed in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party would still win in a real free election. Except for certain small pockets of resistance to the Communist regime, the people have been truly converted in the last 68 years.”
CNN Moscow bureau chief Stuart Loory in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 1986. 

* * * * * * * *  

“Soviet people have become accustomed to security if nothing else. Life isn’t good here, but people don’t go hungry, homeless; a job has always been guaranteed. Now all socialist bets are off. A market economy looms, and the social contract that has held Soviet society together for 72 years no longer applies. The people seem baffled, disappointed, let down. Many don’t like the prospect of their nation becoming just another capitalist machine.”
— CNN Moscow reporter Steve Hurst on PrimeNews, May 24, 1990.

* * * * * * * *

“But for the simple folk of Uzbekistan, people like Kurban Manizayov, these are mind-wrenching times. Their simple wants were nicely cared for by the communists. But now they’ve been thrust into the hurly-burly world of market capitalism, and nobody even bothered to ask if it was all right.”
— CNN Moscow reporter Steve Hurst, August 31, 1992 World News.

As collated by a round-up of lots of DNC-MSM pro-Soviet hagiography in “Better off Red?”, by the Media Research Center, in November of 2011, 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell.

And don’t get CNN founder Ted Turner started on the glories of North Korea: