“Donald Trump has again and again shown himself to be an authoritarian, a tyrant and a bully who’s corrupt and doesn’t deserve to be in the White House,” Sarah Isgur Flores told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on May 16, 2016. Seven months later she was swearing her loyalty to him and his agenda.

Few things better illustrate the empty spectacle of mainstream media grandstanding in the Trump era than CNN’s recent hiring of Flores to help run their 2020 campaign coverage. It’s not just that Flores has no news experience, or that her views are objectionable, though rest assured they are: it took keen-eyed commentators no time to pull up instances of Flores spreading debunked conspiracy theories about Planned Parenthood and grousing about the “liberal media,” including her new employer — or as she calls it, the “Clinton News Network.”

It’s also a fact that in hiring a partisan political operative, CNN has handed the running of news operations, which presumably is still meant to be about speaking truth to power, to someone devoted to skirting ethical lines in the service of that very power.