CNN has reportedly poached discredited right-wing economic pundit Stephen Moore from Fox News. Moore spent years at Fox routinely spreading misinformation about the economy during the Obama administration and spent much of 2016 promoting Donald Trump's failed trickle-down policies while serving as his senior economic adviser. The decision to hire the notoriously incompetent Moore shows that the network remains invested in its failed strategy of giving airtime to partisan hacks instead of qualified experts.

According to a January 30 report from Business Insider, Moore described leaving Fox News as “a hard decision” but said that “CNN made a really good offer.” The report noted that Moore joins “other right-leaning journalists and contributors” recently hired by the network, which has been adding new conservative voices since Election Day. The decision to add Moore to its roster reveals CNN to be on a troubling trajectory because, even among professional political hacks and conservative pundits, Moore has distinguished himself for his particularly shoddy work.

Media Matters has extensively detailed Moore’s terrible track record as an economic analyst for over a decade. Moore has falsely claimed for years that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) forces workers into part-time jobs, he attempted to blame the housing crisis on Bill and Hillary Clinton, he promoted the lie that members of Congress and their staff are “exempt” from the ACA, he supported draconian budget cuts that hurt the economy, and he endorsed Republican attempts to block vital infrastructure spending.

During his tenure as the “chief economist” at the Heritage Foundation, Moore once exaggerated the actual cost estimate of providing unaccompanied minors with access to American public schools by an absurd 63 percent, claiming it would cost $1 billion a year. During a July 2014 dispute with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Moore was caught cherry-picking statistics for an op-ed published by The Kansas City Star to intentionally mislead readers about the relationship between tax cuts and job creation. (The newspaper eventually vowed to stop publishing Moore’s work, which had to be corrected by other outlets as well.)

The examples of Moore being clueless about even the basics of economic policy are legion. For instance, there was the February 19, 2014, interview with CNN in which host Carol Costello stopped Moore’s anti-minimum wage spin dead in its tracks:

Moore is so widely discredited that New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait once mocked him for being unable to “find a single true fact” to back up his support for repealing the ACA. Economist Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities chided Moore in a March 2015 column for his “fact-free” endorsement of anti-union “right-to-work” laws, and Krugman once speculated that Moore’s “incompetence is actually desirable” in conservative circles, because “a smart hack might turn honest.”

It is one thing for CNN to add a conservative perspective to its news coverage, but it is another thing entirely to grant more airtime to an incompetent serial misinformer like Steve Moore. CNN viewers are already forced to endure Trump sycophant Jeffrey Lord’s ignorant and bigoted commentary. Adding Moore to the network’s roster proves once again that CNN boss Jeff Zucker learned nothing from his organization’s humiliating relationship with irreconcilable Trump apologist Corey Lewandowski. Viewers deserve to hear analysis from qualified experts, not hacks who will eschew the facts to toe a predictable party line on every issue.