There’s a human tendency to tune out bad behavior when it seems to be part of a recurring pattern. We become inured to it, desensitized to it. By now, this seems to be the case with CNN, which once called itself The Most Trusted Name in News™. Lately, the once-proud network has been beset by a disturbing drumbeat of sexual deviancy — so much so that we can’t keep track of it.

Just over two months ago, for example, we reported on the various perversions of some of the network’s most popular on-air talent: anchors Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. We also suggested that perhaps CNN’s sexual deviancy was limited to those narcissists in front of the camera rather than the regular folks behind it.

We were wrong.

When news broke that John Griffin, a senior producer for CNN’s flagship morning program “New Day,” had been indicted on federal charges of coercing parents to allow their minor daughters to engage in sexual activity in his home, we realized that there must be something in the water there; that CNN’s creepiness was closer to the rule than the exception; that for every perverted on-air cockroach we see, there are dozens more cockroaches hiding off set and elsewhere around the newsroom.

Up to this point, we’d be lying if we said we’ve taken no pleasure in reporting on CNN’s ongoing sexual saga. We have taken pleasure in it — journalistic pleasure, mind you. But the charges that John Griffin is facing have wiped the smile from our face. If they’re even remotely true, this is one sick dude.

Read the next two paragraphs at your own risk.

As Fox News reports: “According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Vermont, the 44-year-old CNN staffer ‘attempted to entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity’ and in April 2020, he ‘proposed to engage in a "virtual training session” over a video chat that would include him instructing the mother and her 14-year-old daughter to remove their clothing and touch each other at his direction.’“ It gets worse:

"According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a ‘woman is a woman regardless of her age,’ and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Vermont wrote in a statement. “On these communication platforms, Griffin sought to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive. In June of 2020, Griffin advised a mother of 9- and 13-year-old daughters that the mother’s responsibility was to see that her older daughter was ‘trained properly.’”

To its credit, CNN reported on this story, too, noting that Griffin allegedly kept an online profile on a “BDSM [bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism] dating, Fetish, and Kink Site” for several years leading up to July 2020, on which he allegedly wrote he was looking for women who were “sexually ‘submissive’ and ‘open-minded.’”

Of course, given the sheer awfulness of the story, perhaps CNN simply made a calculation that it might as well drive much-needed traffic to its own website.

“The charges against Mr. Griffin are deeply disturbing,” a CNN spokesperson said Saturday. “We only learned of his arrest yesterday afternoon and have suspended him pending investigation.”

Of far more consequence to Griffin, though, is the statement from the FBI, which reads in part: “The allegations are deeply disturbing, and our office is committed to working with our partners at the United States Attorney’s Office District of Vermont to ensure Mr. Griffin is held accountable for his actions. The FBI, along with our law enforcement partners, will continue to aggressively investigate those who victimize the most vulnerable in our communities.”

It’s a sick and disturbing story, to say the least. This guy worked at CNN for eight years, though. So we can’t help but wonder: What did his colleagues know, and when did they know it? And how much money did CNN have to pay Fox News’s Chris Wallace to come join this cesspool?