Permit me to sit out the Great Media Apology Tour of 2016. Since election night, we have been fed a steady stream of mea culpas for the press's failure to see it all coming, and especially for negligently ignoring the fear, anxiety and despair in the Rust Belt, the oil patch and rural America. Benighted Trump voters were singing the Red America Blues while we elites were tuned to Live from the Met or some such.

Fake news has been all the (out)rage in the past few days, as it emerged that incendiary phony stories -- almost all of them benefitting Donald Trump -- actually outperformed major news outlets on Facebook over the last three months of the presidential campaign.

For CNN to air Democratic insiders like Donna Brazile and David Axelrod, and Trump proxies Cory Lewandowski and Jeffrey Lord is (to coin an adjective) deplorable. They are not commentators. They are shills, offering none of the insight, context, informed opinion or even insider knowledge the audience has the right to expect from opinion journalists. Rather, they are destined to say only what they deem beneficial to their candidate or party. Which makes them useless, and which makes CNN a nightly purveyor of consumer deception.