Twitter Ratio King Chris Cillizza joined his friends Chris Cuomo, Brian Stelter and former boss Jeff Zucker in the long line of dismissed CNN employees on Thursday. While Cillizza may still offer up heaped dishes of bad takes on social media, he will no longer be doing so under the banner of the supposed new direction of CNN under CEO Chris Licht.
What exactly do people like me mean when we call Cillizza the “Ratio King”? The ratio is what happens on Twitter when the number of comments on a tweet vastly outweighs its likes, retweets and quote tweets, meaning people are criticizing the tweet far more than endorsing it. And Cillizza, who may have accidentally even given birth to this unit of measurement, has owned the mantle for years now.
Cillizza has captured the hearts and minds of both the political left and right with takes like “In Defense of Ivanka Trump.” He also authored one of the most screencapped tweets in history: “Let me say for the billionth time: Reporters don’t root for a side. Period.”
Cillizza’s journalist accomplishments include wondering out loud whether a fictional Marvel Comics city could become reality and celebrating a Trumpian “epic fast food photo.” He is the proverbial Woodward and Bernstein of the bad take, managing to take incoming fire from all directions over how bad his opinions are. The former tech website Mashable ran the numbers behind Cillizza’s ratios and found him ahead of even MSNBC pundit Joy Reid, former Bush official turned blogger David Frum and The View’s Ana Navarro (who also might be on the outs at CNN).
The numbers don’t lie: almost no one does journalism or Twitter as badly as Cillizza. That most likely means he’ll fail upward to another network, or back to the Washington Post where he honed his powers early on.
Cillizza mastered the art of looking at irrelevant stories and finding ways to somehow make them shittier. He’ll always have Twitter, but he’ll no longer be plying his craft in the name of CNN. Godspeed, you king.
