Early Friday morning, someone posted what appeared to be a controversial video on Twitter featuring two, prominent CNN anchors which spread far and wide — because, after a couple seconds, most normal people realized that what they were watching wasn’t real. And they also understood that the clip of Wolf Blitzer and John King was meant to be taken as biting, satirical commentary on recent news involving the cable news giant itself, which my colleague Mike Miller told you about just over two weeks ago.

PJ Media’s Victoria Taft writes about the “controversial” Twitter video:

CNN has announced that no, one of the top x-rated sites on the internet did not sponsor its election coverage.

Someone loosed upon the internet a faked video showing CNN anchor John King on election night manning his “multi-touch collaboration wall” or “magic wall” making election predictions, when suddenly a banner ad for the company Porn Hub appears.

[…]

There are those who thought someone behind the scenes had the x-rated site up and accidentally flashed the logo on live TV, but it doesn’t work that way.

I love Victoria’s jab at John King’s somewhat peevish response to the video.

She wrote:

Come on, John, it’s CNN. How many people could possibly have seen it?

Ouch. Just one more, quick point on King’s reaction, before we move on. Keep in mind he’s one of the primary anchors at a major cable news channel. It’s pretty amazing, if you think about it, that someone like that would give even a nod to something so insignificant — especially when we still don’t know who won the 2020 election. Can you image a Mike Wallace or Tim Russert spending more than a minute on something this dopey? Me, neither.

Anyway. there’re some people who seem to think you’ll be fooled by such videos. Like our betters at Twitter.

Apparently Toobin’s been reinstated. https://t.co/SKoJyxSOCJ

— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) November 6, 2020

Will you look at that warning? We know it’s not real, Twitter. Because anyone with common sense can see it’s an obvious joke, aimed at CNN hack Jeffrey Toobin, as the retweet from my colleague at sister publication Bearing Arms clearly shows.

Above the video, Cam wrote: “Apparently Toobin’s been reinstated.”

What’s going on here? I’ll tell you: some GenZ ne’er-do-well working for Jack and living in his or her parents’ basement felt the need to point out that it’s fake, not only with a siren-red exclamation point symbol and the warning: “Manipulated media” (see above tweet), but zir coworkers wrote up an entire “event” page devoted to debunking it. You think I’m kidding? Look for yourselves. The social media platform that has pledged, under oath, it’s spending every waking moment keeping a vigilant eye out for election interference is wasting its time debunking joke tweets and flagging them as malicious attempts at misinformation.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The ever-helpful folks at Mediaite took a blind stab at explaining why people might find such an awful video funny, and manage to miss the point completely.

This video has already been shared broadly because it appears to resonate with a certain segment of Twitter users familiar with the feeling of unwanted and embarrassing pop-up ads or tabs revealing activities and interests best left private.

In another sign that they don’t get it, Mediaite goes on to lump the innocuous clip in with “deep-faked videos,” and makes sympathetic noises about how burdensome this is for a well-coddled legacy media:

Having to deal with deep faked videos does not make life easier for these people.

Hey, Mediaite. Here’s the world’s smallest violin playing a requiem for the brave firefighters at CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and the other media outlets you love to give cover to.

H/T Cam Edwards