You’re right.

And if we take a step further in this direction, we can see that this article… is fake.

It’s not real. If you read it carefully, it’s a case study in media manipulation.

The article starts by quoting Henry Cuellar, who is a long-time corporate Democrat wildly out of step with the party. He isn’t representative.

After that, it repeatedly asserts the will of unnamed moderates, with a few unattributed quotes.

Once it’s built up some momentum it presents quotes in which people say things that don’t actually substantiate the article’s premise, but frame it to imply that they did. Consider this one:

“They need to be very thoughtful and deliberate on what sort of impeachment investigations strategy is pursued,” said Phil Gardner, a senior adviser for the moderate campaign group Blue Dog Action

“There is so much corruption, so many things to be outraged about, that it could very quickly end up consuming the entirety of the caucus if we’re not careful,” Gardner said, adding: “Impeachment is a very grave decision.”

An editor could put this in an article headlined “Centrists Argue Against Impeachment” or “Centrists Begin Plans for Trump’s Impeachment”. The absence of context and choice of quote is selected to allow it to be used to imply agreement with the author’s premise, regardless of the subject’s intent.

But where things really get absurd is around the 26th paragraph, when the article includes a long quote from Sam Forester, who just won back a Trump +9 district:

“I think everybody in this country should have the choice to join Medicare,” Forstag said in an interview with CNN days after he won. He added that seniors in his district have only a single provider to choose from for Medicare Part B plans, while people with private insurance have only two choices — both of which just dramatically raised rates.

“I am, and we should all be, very angry that the last time Democrats had unified control of our government, they made tiny piecemeal incremental changes, and they applied Band-Aid solutions instead of actually fixing our healthcare system,” Forstag told CNN, summing up his push for big change.

This quote appears in the context that moderate Democrats are concerned that too much action is a political risk. The quote directly contradicts the article’s premise, but to get around this they present him as a “populist” and imply he’s part of the left flank, even though he’s exactly the kind of rural, red-state working class Democrat that will control whether they keep the house in two years.

The obvious conclusion is that the author, Sarah Ferris, was told to write an article that promotes a conflict narrative that supports CNN’s business and pro-corporate, insider-friendly posture. Facts were irrelevant.

I think I’m going to start using my own domain, so I can change hosts if needed without having to change email addresses. This seems like it’s going to be an issue we’ll always need to be prepared to deal with.