Scott Jennings: CNN Has to Be Trolling at this Point

Renee Good is not a talking point. But for Scott Jennings and CNN, a fatal shooting in Minneapolis is just another opportunity to 'both sides' the indefensible.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I have never been the guy who calls for someone’s job. Every American deserves an honest way to make a living. Operative word: honest.

And I mean that. I don’t care what you do—pastor, stripper, teacher, bartender, athlete, porn star, whatever. If you’re not breaking laws and you’re not hurting people, get your money. I’m not the employment police. I’m not the career coroner. I’m not standing outside your workplace like a human Yelp review screaming “ACCOUNTABILITY!” into a megaphone powered by pure spite.

But with CNN and Scott Jennings, we have moved way past the point of ridiculousness.

This isn’t “I disagree with him.” This isn’t “he’s conservative.” This isn’t “it’s good to have different perspectives.” This is CNN taking a man who treats truth like a suggestion and putting him on primetime like he’s a civic treasure instead of what he is: a bad-faith operative with a nice haircut and the kind of confidence you only develop when you never have to pay a price for anything you say.

At this point, CNN NewsNight isn’t a news show. It’s a showroom. It’s a nightly demo of oxygen journalism—where illegitimate arguments don’t show up to get confronted, they show up to get kept alive. The whole production is built to keep bad faith breathing long enough to reproduce. And Scott Jennings is one of the show’s most reliable oxygen tanks: rolled out whenever the producers need conflict, noise, and the appearance of balance without the inconvenience of standards.

I started this article late last week. And right as Lincoln Square was ready to publish it, Scott Jennings couldn’t help himself—because of course he couldn’t. In the aftermath of the ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis that killed Renee Good, Jennings went on CNN and did the same credibility-cosplay routine he always does: he framed public outrage as premature, insisted there were “two points of view,” floated a version of events that conveniently sounded like a defense brief being drafted in real time, and then pivoted into blaming Democrats for the temperature of the country. A woman is dead, and he’s already on television sanding down the moral edges, redirecting consequence away from power, and trying to make “wait for more facts” sound like a substitute for basic decency.

I’ve written about Jennings more than I ever wanted to. I’ve already broken down the hot take economy and how it turned public discourse into a carnival where the prize is attention and the cost is reality. I’ve already described what it feels like watching CNN let him talk while my brain tries to escape my skull like it’s filing a restraining order against my television. I’ve already dragged him on my own platform in those earlier breakdowns, when I should’ve been doing literally anything healthier for my blood pressure—like stretching, drinking water, or not watching CNN in the first place.

So no, this isn’t me enjoying the attention. I don’t “like” writing about Scott Jennings. I don’t wake up thinking, “You know what would really round out my day? A fresh Jennings segment to ruin my mood.” The minute he pops up on screen, my body reacts the way it reacts to expired food: immediate distrust, immediate regret, immediate “who let this in the house?”

And because CNN apparently can’t resist humiliating itself, Jennings has put me in a position where I have to say something that should not be possible in a functioning society:

He’s made me agree—out loud—with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Only on one narrow point, obviously. I’m not joining her group chat. I’m not buying matching tinfoil. But Jennings is so committed to deflection and dishonesty that he created a moment where even a person like Greene could correctly clock what he does for a living.

The staging matters: Greene was not on the NewsNight panel. The panel was CNN’s people, with Jennings in his usual role—smirking, pivoting, and treating a serious question like it’s a game show where points are awarded for confidence instead of accuracy.

The spark was Greene’s claim that Trump warned her “friends will get hurt” if Epstein-related files were released. Instead of dealing with the implication—why would Trump be worried about “friends” being exposed in Epstein documents?—Jennings tried to reroute the entire conversation into motive-policing, turning Greene into the story and the substance into background noise. That exchange is the routine in its purest form: ignore the smoke, interrogate the person pointing at the fire.

Then Greene responded afterward—publicly—by calling Jennings a liar and dragging his résumé like it owed her money. I’m not defending Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m saying something simpler: when someone with her reputation is accurately diagnosing your dishonesty, you’ve reached a level of bad faith that even the worst people can recognize on sight.

And that’s the point: this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern.

Start with the moment that became emblematic because it’s so clean it almost feels like parody. On CNN, Scott Jennings tried to big-time Franklin Leonard—a Black film executive and the founder of The Black List, a major platform that elevates unproduced screenplays and writers—and hit him with: “This is an I.Q. test. Don’t fail it.” This was after Leonard made the mere suggestion that the Epstein files should be released if Trump really is innocent, radical I know.

That wasn’t persuasion. That was humiliation. That wasn’t argument. That was condescension. That wasn’t analysis. That was the kind of cheap jab that lets you feel smarter without having to be correct. Middle-school energy with cable-news lighting.

And yes, it matters that Leonard is Black—not because Blackness is the headline, but because “IQ” language in America has a long, ugly history as a supposedly “objective” way to smuggle hierarchy into polite conversation. So when a white conservative pundit throws “IQ test” at a Black man on national television and then pretends it’s just banter, it’s not banter—it’s a wink. And the wink is the point.

That’s why the clip kept circulating. That’s why it stuck. That’s why it became its own little cable-news morality play in the clip. Not because everyone is fragile, but because the country is exhausted from watching people smuggle ugly ideas into “debate” language and then hide behind plausible deniability like it’s bulletproof glass.

Jennings, after receiving immediate backlash, then tried to claim to Leonard, “Come on, we’re friends, man!” And this is where I’m going to say something people understand but don’t always say plainly: I’ve known plenty of racist people in my life. Not the cartoon villains. Not the ones who show up announcing their hate like it’s a brand deal. I mean the ones who think they’re decent. The ones who believe they deserve credit for not using slurs in public while still clinging to the same assumptions that built the whole mess.

And because I’m a functioning adult who doesn’t turn every room into a courtroom, some of them mistake my tolerance for their presence as friendship. They confuse civility with closeness. They confuse patience with permission. They take “he didn’t explode today” as proof we’re cool.

Those people love Scott Jennings because he speaks their language: implication and retreat. Say something nasty. Smirk. When it lands the way it lands, act wounded and insist everyone else is overreacting. Then lecture everyone about tone. It’s not just dishonest—it’s manipulative.

And if CNN wants to pretend this is just “sharp debate,” fine. Widen the lens.

Jennings has crossed into smears that don’t just distort debate but put targets on people’s backs. A clear example is what he said about Rep. Ilhan Omar—language that didn’t read like disagreement, it read like an accusation designed to inflame. The backlash wasn’t hard to predict, because that kind of rhetoric isn’t “a viewpoint.” It’s a match tossed into dry grass.

A serious network draws lines. A serious network says: argue policy all you want, but you don’t smear elected officials like that here. CNN didn’t do that, because CNN didn’t build a business model around boundaries. CNN built a business model around segments.

And that brings me to the biggest reason I hate CNN NewsNight: the life it gives to illegitimate debate topics. I’m a firm believer that if you allow a bullshit debate on the air and give it room to breathe, it’s a debate you automatically lose.

Because the win for the bad-faith actor is never actually “winning” the debate.

The win is that the debate happened at all.

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That’s the hustle. Get the premise into the room. Get a serious host to treat it like a serious question. Get a chyron to frame it like an open controversy. Once that happens, you’ve already cashed the check. You don’t need to win. Legitimacy was the prize.

I’ve seen this in college and university settings more times than I can count. I once got asked if I wanted to participate in a creationism vs. science debate and I said absolutely not—not because I don’t respect religion, but because religion is not science. You don’t walk into a laboratory and argue Genesis like it’s peer-reviewed research. The minute you agree to that format, you’ve already done the damage: you’ve treated theology like it’s competing evidence.

Then there was that stretch around 2015–2017 when flat-eartherism felt like it was at an all-time high. I had students ask why we couldn’t have a flat earth vs. round earth debate. I told them because flat earth is not real and has been debunked numerous times. And again, the point of staging that debate isn’t to seek truth. The point is to smuggle a dead idea back into the room wearing the costume of legitimacy. The debate itself is the con.

Now fast-forward to 2024, when bad debates over race were at an all-time high. And this is where the humor has to stop for a second, because the stakes aren’t academic.

My humanity is not up for debate.

It is insulting—deeply insulting—that public figures and media personalities treat the basic premise of equality like it’s a spicy topic for a Friday night panel. I’ve written about that dynamic, because we are living in an era where moral rot keeps getting framed as “brave discussion,” and the people most impacted are expected to smile and participate like it’s a seminar instead of an insult.

And here’s the part that makes me want to throw my phone into the ocean: some of the same people who would never tolerate their humanity being debated suddenly become philosophers when it’s yours. They start talking about “hearing people out” and “difficult conversations,” like we’re discussing tax brackets and not whether certain Americans are allowed to be treated as fully human in public life.

That’s why it disgusted me when Gavin Newsom had Charlie Kirk on his show, and later had Steve Bannon. Not because I’m afraid of disagreement. Not because I can’t handle argument. But because this is the same trap with better lighting: you hand a provocateur a serious chair, a serious platform, and the implied message that their worldview is simply one more respectable perspective in America’s marketplace of ideas. That’s oxygen journalism with a state seal on it, and that whole era of “platforming as strategy” has receipts, including the Kirk blowback and the Bannon episode.

The defenders always make the same mistake. They think the “win” is whether the host lands a clean punch.

That isn’t the win.

The win is that the guest got to sit there in the first place. The win is that you normalized the premise. The win is that you made the audience feel like we’re all just calmly exploring “both sides,” even when one side is arguing in bad faith and the other side is expected to clean up the mess in real time.

And this is why Charlie Kirk’s whole “debate” circuit was always such a sham. When he was doing these “debates” with novice college students—where he’d spend two hours mocking women or Black people and then, after the performance, the kids would ask questions and everybody would wax poetic about what a great debater he was—I called bullshit then and I’m calling bullshit now. No, he wasn’t a good debater. He was good at getting college students to debate him over things that weren’t up for debate in the first place, but MAGA had successfully rebranded as “debate.”

That’s the win for these fuckers: having the debate.

And that’s exactly how Scott Jennings moves.

Scott Jennings doesn’t need to win an argument. He needs CNN to treat the argument like it’s a legitimate public question. He needs a serious set. A serious host. Serious people on the other side. That’s the entire strategy: credibility cosplay. Dress bad faith up like analysis, then act offended when anyone recognizes what they’re seeing.

So when CNN insists this is “centrism,” I start laughing, because centrism is not the absence of ideology. Centrism is a side too. It’s a posture. It’s a brand strategy. It’s the belief that the midpoint between a fact and a lie is where wisdom lives, as if truth is a negotiation and not a standard.

And unfortunately, this has been the play for CNN since the corporate world decided “centrist” was a product category. WBD’s largest shareholder John Malone said the quiet part out loud—CNN should be more centrist. That framing doesn’t mean “more true.” It means “more marketable.” It means “more comfortable for viewers who want to feel informed without being confronted by reality.”

Journalism’s job is not to take a left side or a right side. It is to tell the truth. And “centrism,” as practiced on cable news, too often means treating truth like it’s just one ingredient in a recipe.

Centrism becomes partisan the moment it insists every question has two equally valid poles. It becomes partisan the moment it treats injustice as one “perspective.” It becomes partisan the moment it prioritizes sounding balanced over being accurate. It becomes partisan because it rewards the side that benefits most from confusion. When one side is lying, “splitting the difference” isn’t fairness—it’s laundering.

And now we’re about to enter another corporate era, with Netflix announcing plans tied to acquiring Warner Bros assets in its announcement. Whatever dominoes fall from that, the direction CNN is going in right now is ethically indefensible.

Even though I don’t watch CNN regularly anymore—outside of the occasional YouTube rabbit hole where the algorithm decides I deserve punishment—there could still be value in CNN from an ethical standpoint if it returned to actual reporting and the basic tenets of journalism: verification, accountability, and the courage to say, plainly, “No, that isn’t true.”

But that requires CNN to stop rewarding professional liars with prestige airtime.

Because what Scott Jennings does goes beyond a right-wing perspective. It’s active normalization—of racism, of political criminality, of basic factual dishonesty, and of the idea that reality is optional as long as you sound confident. He belongs on Fox News, OAN, or any other right-wing rag where the product is grievance and the business model is affirmation.

CNN wants the branding of seriousness while running oxygen journalism. That’s what makes it uniquely corrosive. Fox sells ideology. CNN sells the appearance of neutrality while letting bad faith sit in the serious chair. That’s why I’ll say something that sounds harsh but is true: in my opinion, Jennings is worse than a lot of Fox pundits—not because Fox is clean, but because CNN keeps pretending this is journalism while doing credibility cosplay.

And yes, I’m going to say it: I don’t like Jake Tapper’s gimmicks, and that Biden book mess doesn’t exactly scream “trust the framing.” But Tapper, at minimum, operates in the realm of arguments—even when the arguments are stupid. Jennings isn’t doing argument. He’s doing contamination. He’s doing atmosphere. He’s doing smirk-based propaganda with a “reasonable conservative” label taped on top like a price tag.

Jennings is a disgrace to punditry and human decency.

And if you’re a regular watcher of CNN, demand better. Not politely. Not vaguely. Not in the “I’m just concerned” voice people use when they’re afraid of being called dramatic. Demand it plainly, because the longer this goes on, the more CNN trains its audience to accept a world where truth is just one opinion among many.

And once a society accepts that, it doesn’t matter who “wins” the debate—because the concept of a shared reality is already gone.

That’s the real cost of oxygen journalism. Not that Scott Jennings annoys me. Not that he ruins my evening. Not that he makes me want to throw my remote like I’m trying out for the NFL.

The cost is that CNN is teaching millions of people that bad faith is a normal way to participate in democracy.

And going into 2026, that’s not just embarrassing.

It’s dangerous.

And before I close this out, I want to say one thing plainly—because cable news has a way of turning human beings into “segments,” and I refuse to do that.

Renee Good is not a talking point. She is not a chyron. She is not a prop for anyone’s narrative, and she is damn sure not the kind of tragedy you use as a set piece to audition your “both sides” routine.

She was a person. She mattered. She was loved. And now there are people who have to live with an absence that will never stop echoing—while television treats the loss like content and moves on to the next block. Scott Jennings, you are a fucking piece of shit!

Rest in peace, Renee. You deserved to go home.

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