For more than a month, CNN has been hyping its showing this week of a new biographical documentary film about the famous singer and recording artist, Linda Ronstadt.  At age 73 now, Ronstadt has been out of the public eye for the past decade after being diagnosed with a serious, degenerative neurological condition — initially thought to be Parkinson's but in late 2019 confirmed to be progressive supranuclear palsy.  The 95-minute-long documentary, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, was co-produced by CNN and had its television premiere in prime time on CNN on New Year's Day.  It will re-air tonight, January 4, at 9 P.M. E.T./P.T.

The film itself was bad enough (see below).  But on New Year's Eve, exactly one day before its showing, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper goaded Ronstadt into an on-camera interview shown on his prime-time program AC 360 so she could contribute to the channel's non-stop bashing of President Trump.  Not surprisingly, the interview made big news across the mainstream media landscape.  Newsweek summarized the salient points in an article titled "Linda Ronstadt Compares Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler":

In a CNN interview, singer Linda Ronstadt compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, saying both used strategies to "find a common enemy for everybody to hate."

Appearing before the CNN premiere of her documentary The Sound of My Voice, Ronstadt told anchor Anderson Cooper she was certain that Trump would be elected when he announced his campaign.

"I was sure that Trump was going to get elected, the day he announced," the "When Will I Be Loved" singer told CNN. "I said, 'It's going to be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews.'"

Ronstadt also drew parallels between Trump and Hitler's ascension to their respective offices, saying that because few spoke out against their behavior while they campaigned. [sic]

"The intelligentsia of Berlin, and the literati, and all the artists were just busy doing their thing. Hitler rose to power — there were a lot of chances to stop him, and they didn't speak out," she told Cooper.

Screen shot: Linda Ronstadt on AC 360, CNN, December 31, 2019.

In her conversation with Cooper, Ronstadt, like all of the president's left-wing critics who decry him as another Hitler, failed to cite any evidence for her assertions or examples of the POTUS's alleged dictatorial actions.  Her claims that Germany's "intelligentsia," "literati," and "all the artists" "didn't speak out" against Hitler — and that there is some sort of parallel situation in the U.S. today — are absurd.  In reality, the anti-Trump Resistance demanding his ouster has been a powerful and omnipresent force opposing the president in American popular culture, the media, academia, and other sectors since before President Trump was even inaugurated.

It turns out that Ronstadt is not new to the anti-Trump Resistance.  On September 28, 2017, The Guardian published an interview with her.  In response to the question "What do you think will happen under Donald Trump?," Ronstadt replied:

It's a genuine national emergency. What he wants is to be in control of the media, and he has an acute instinct for the lowest common denominator — he knows how to go really low. So if we don't wake up, he could turn us into a dictatorship. I've read a lot on the history of Hitler, and people keep drawing comparisons ... they're so staggering — it's step by step by step. He's isolating us, he's taking us out [of contact] with South America, Mexico, Canada ... if we get attacked from outside, who's going to come to our rescue if we've isolated ourselves from our neighbours?

In the same interview, Ronstadt made the strange admission "I don't like any of my [28] albums," adding that she never listens to them.

The CNN documentary

I happen to know a few things about Ronstadt and her career, having reported extensively on former California Gov. Jerry Brown between 1976 and 1992.  For approximately five years, starting around 1976 when the two encountered each other at Lucy's El Adobe Cafe in Los Angeles, Ronstadt was Brown's girlfriend.

Linda Ronstadt with Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles after a benefit concert for Brown's first presidential campaign raised over $200,000 from a capacity crowd of 18,500 at the Capitol Centre, Landover, Maryland May 14, 1976.
Photo © by Peter Barry Chowka.

The CNN documentary gave short shrift to Ronstadt's relationship with Jerry Brown.  It turns out that the supposed comprehensive biographical review of Ronstadt's life and career was a self-serving, hagiographic whitewash, orchestrated and approved by Ronstadt herself.  Any rough edges were expertly smoothed out.  A lot of essential history and information was left on the cutting room floor.

In a review of the program, Variety revealed that Ronstadt exerted a large degree of control over the film's production.

Ronstadt had cast a wary eye on the idea of a documentary of her life. "There were several offers out there, and I said 'No,'" she recalls. But [producers] Epstein and Friedman had worked on a documentary on the life of Harvey Milk that she was familiar with from PBS, and she says she thought, "If I have to make this one, it's not so bad. Maybe I have a chance to stop the other ones." She reached an understanding with the producers, she says: the documentary would have to be limited to the events she described in her 2013 memoir, "Simple Dreams." . . . Booklist had described her memoir as a sort of safe place: "There are no tales of parental cruelty or substance abuse (someone in the CNN film alludes to potential use by Ronstadt of diet pills). [emphasis added.]

Although several of Ronstadt's romantic liaisons were referenced, it was not mentioned that she had never married and that she is the single mother of two adopted children. Perhaps the most glaring omission in this author's opinion was the fact that brilliant musician and producer Andrew Gold, Ronstadt's principal musical collaborator in the 1970s, was not mentioned at all. It was Gold, who died in 2011, who arranged, played on, and co-produced Ronstadt's five most successful albums, including her 1974 tour de force breakout LP Heart Like a Wheel that featured her only number one single hit, "You're No Good." As anyone who understands popular music knows, it is a producer in the studio who — more than anyone else in the process — ensures the success or failure of a recorded work.

Another inexplicable aspect of the film entailed a soundbite, which CNN highlighted and used in its promos, that featured singer Emmylou Harris insisting that Ronstadt was — to paraphrase — the first female rock 'n' roll star. What about earlier female rock icons like Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Connie Francis, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin, I wondered?

The film leaned heavily on Ronstadt's Latino background, which in reality, according to Wikipedia (citing a variety of primary sources), represented only one part of her multi-ethnic heritage.

Linda's father came from a pioneering Arizona ranching family and was of German, English, and Mexican ancestry. . . Her mother Ruth Mary, of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, was raised in Flint, Michigan.

While the film noted repeatedly and approvingly that Ronstadt grew up singing traditional Mexican songs in Spanish with her family, she commented later in the film that she doesn't speak Spanish and was basically lip-syncing lyrics in Spanish as a child. Her crowning achievement as an artist, according to the production, was her 1987 album of Mariachi songs sung in Spanish, "Canciones de mi Padre" (Songs of My Father).

Fortunately, the film wasn't all bad, with the best or most interesting parts being archival clips of musicians and performers of the past before they achieved fame, including members of the Eagles. Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor.

While CNN appears to have had high hopes for its Ronstadt documentary being a runaway hit with the viewing audience, when the ratings came out two days later it had clearly underperformed. The Ronstadt program did manage to win its 9 P.M. E.T. time slot in the Nielsen ratings but only barely. According to TVNewser, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, had 1.9 million total viewers compared with second place Fox News that ran a pre-recorded Hannity "special" featuring the host's past monologues that got 1.53 million viewers. The margin of victory in the preferred demographic (viewers 25-54) was even tighter, as CNN had 295,000 viewers in that metric compared to Fox News's 234,000. The number one program in total viewers that day on all of cable news wasn't even in prime time; it was the 5 P.M. E.T. showing on Fox News of The Five New Year's Day Special, with 1.94 million viewers.

As noted, readers interested in checking out the Ronstadt program for themselves have two more chances tonight at 9 P.M. E.T./P.T. when it repeats on CNN. The competition tonight, however, will be tough: A brand new live episode of Justice with Judge Jeanine is on the Fox News channel at 9 P.M. and that show is almost always the highest rated program on cable news every week on Saturdays.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter's website is http://peter.media.  His new YouTube channel is here. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.