If CNN really wanted to brand itself as a “Facts First” news channel, why did it promise to air a gushy documentary about fiercely feminist Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Labor Day weekend? In case you didn’t know, this film is actually a production by “CNN Films,” founded in 2012 to offer “distinguished, thought-provoking documentary programming to audiences on CNN's platforms around the world.”
CNN’s film RBG first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where the media fawned all over it, and her. Entertainment Weekly oozed "Forget movie stars. The hottest celebrity at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Ginsburg’s apparently iconic line is “All I ask of my brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
That’s an interesting line for the abortion-on-demand feminists.
Ginsburg appeared at the festival for an interview with none other than NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, who is her unofficial publicist at laudatory public events like this. Totenberg also gushes over her in the documentary. “She’s become such an icon...Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed the way the world is for American women.”
The film’s graphic carries the words “Hero. Icon. Dissenter.” Couldn’t the very same thing be said of Antonin Scalia? Or Clarence Thomas? Not in a million years. It was Totenberg who tried to ruin Thomas with unproven sex-harassment charges.
Then CNN put RBG in the cinemas, and it grossed $13.9 million in #Resistance tickets. Liberal newspapers called it a box-office “winner” almost immediately. In early May, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday gushed under this headline: “And the summer box office’s big winner is...Ruth Bader Ginsburg?” It grossed two million dollars in its first weekend. That’s not exactly an “Avengers” opening, but what the hell.
In late August, USA Today film writer Bryan Alexander sized up the season’s cinematic winners and losers and proclaimed that the “Best New Superhero Duo” of the summer movie season was “Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mister Rogers.” (A Rogers documentary, promoted by the liberals as a salve for Trump’s tweets, grossed $22 million.)
Hollywood has also gotten into the act this year with insipid television tributes. In March, the ABC sitcom Splitting Up offered the plot that a doctor told a divorced mother that her teenaged boy should be encouraged to masturbate without shame, so she creates a “masturbation nook” for him with a picture of….we kid you not....Justice Ginsburg.
In April, the Fox sitcom New Girl wackily celebrated a “feminist icons” birthday party theme for a three-year-old girl named Ruth, named after… Justice Ginsburg. The kiddies celebrates with pictures of Ginsburg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
Just six days later, the CBS sitcom Man with a Plan featured a mom pushing on her little girl a Barbie doll that’s….Justice Ginsburg, because “She just has more important things to do than fix her hair.” The daughter asks “Where are her sparkles?” Mommy replies: “On her brain. Yeah. Ruth here has done a lot of important work for our country.”
So it’s not just CNN that feels compelled to roll up a block of marble to place under Justice Ginsburg. Next up is a more fictional “based on real events” movie titled On The Basis of Sex, with Star Wars actress Felicity Jones playing young leftist Ginsburg. It’s being distributed by Focus Features, owned by NBC Universal. It’s the latest bucket of evidence that the liberal media march in lockstep, both in “news” and entertainment.
