CNN’s Existential War With Trump bit.ly/2ANufDO
After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93% of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative.
Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics.
No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.
In his serial pushbacks against CNN, Trump has not ordered his DOJ to monitor communications of any @CNN reporter, in the manner of @EricHolder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen.
.@AP journalists are not being monitored by the admin as they were during Obama years. This is oddly never cited by CNN who is want to decry its own treatment by the admin, and is not particularly vocal when its professional colleagues were placed under electronic surveillance
But most importantly, both @CillizzaCNN and White House correspondent @Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”
Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters"
.@Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”
Didn’t CNN reporter @MKRaju in December 2017 falsely assert that Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment.
What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?
Why did anchor @ChrisCuomo falsely assert that only the media (i.e., outlets like CNN) could download the hacked email trove of @JohnPodesta—as if it was illegal for anyone else to do the same?
Why did anchor @ChrisCuomo falsely assert that only the media (i.e., outlets like CNN) could download the hacked email trove of @JohnPodesta—as if it was illegal for anyone else to do the same?
(e.g., “Remember, it is illegal to possess these stolen documents. It is different from the media. So everything you learn about this, you are learning from us.”)? What CNN legal counsel gave him such absurd advice?
Why did CNN’s own “unnamed source”—namely @LannyDavis—later deny he had ever given CNN any information that Trump had advance warning of a meeting between Russian interests and Donald Trump, Jr.?
Why didn't the authors of the false story, @JimSciutto, @CarlBernstein and Marshall Cohen, retract the allegation, or explain exactly why Lanny Davis was claiming that he never told the 3 that his client had professed foreknowledge of the meeting on the part of Trump?
Why were Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, the supposed dream team of CNN investigative reporters, all forced to resign from CNN? Was it their collective but false report that @Scaramucci was connected to a $10B Russian investment fund?
What were the sources for that fake account? Did that news account hurt the Trump transition? Would they have been so fast and loose with the truth in the case of president-elect Hillary Clinton?
Might they instead have reported at about the same time on the Clinton’s campaign funding of the Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele project?
CNN’s @GloriaBorger, Eric Lichtblau, @JakeTapper and Brian Rokus, remember, also had erroneously reported that @Comey would in congressional testimony soon contradict Trump’s prior assertion that he was told by Comey that he was not under investigation.
That report proved false—and yet it too had helped to whip up anti-Trump hysteria on the eve of the Comey appearance. Why is it that one can easily predict the particular political slant of these fake news stories?
Even in trivial matters, CNN has fudged the truth and always in a predictably biased direction—as, for example, in its selective viewing of a video that suggested Trump buffoonishly had preempted the Japanese Prime Minister and overfed fish during a joint photo-op.
Earlier, CNN had reported that singer Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the music of her father Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”—a story of her purported anger that Sinatra denied.
During the lead-up to the Gorsuch nomination announcement, CNN’s @jeffzeleny inaccurately announced that the Trump WH was “setting up [the] SCOTUS announcement as a prime-time contest” by creating 2 “identical Twitter pages” for both possible nominees Gorsuch and Hardiman.
The shoddiness in reporting about Trump and the occasional flat-out inaccurate new stories reflect a toxic network culture in which partisanship is now standard and apparently to be expected.
A certain furor over Trump often erupts in repeated, obscene anti-Trump and unprofessional outbursts of CNN journalists, contributors, and anchors—whether Anderson Cooper trashing a pro-Trump panelist by profanely retorting, “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!”
Or CNN religious scholar @RezaAslan referring to Trump as “this piece of sh-t,” or perhaps the late CNN host Anthony Bourdain joking in an interview about poisoning Trump or CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin’s infamous photo-pose holding a facsimile of Trump’s severed head.
We saw such biased activism during the Ferguson drama when the entire CNN newsroom adopted an on-air “hands up, don’t shoot” pose—an emulation of the false narrative surrounding the shooting death of Michael Brown, Proven a lie by grand jury testimonies and investigation by DOJ
CNN has created a landscape in which not only are journalists likely to relax professional standards when it comes to reporting on Trump, but there is a sloppy environment of crude disparagement of a candidate and later president, and a general indifference to journalistic ethics
The permeating ethos is perhaps best illustrated by the CNN staffers working with CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux during the campaign who were caught on a hot mic joking about the crash of Trump’s jet.
CNN contributor James Clapper has suggested that President Trump is being duped as if he was a de facto Russian asset, while another CNN contributor, Michael Hayden, has compared Trump and his policies to Hitler, ICE to the Holocaust, and America under Trump to Nazi Germany.
.@DonLemon recently asserted that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men”—another false assertion given that radical Islamist terrorists have killed far more Americans in terrorist acts than have white men...
..., whether left-wing or right-wing, and despite the fact that while “white men” constitute about a third of the U.S. population, Islamists constitute a mere fraction.
At least @camanpour (“I believe in being truthful not neutral”) was intellectually honest when she asserted—in some sense echoing the confessions of New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg—that journalists could not and should not be neutral reporters any longer
In fact, the duty of a journalist is to stay neutral and to report the truth, at least as it can be determined by testimonies, evidence, motive, and common sense—without worry whether such reporting injures or aids a particular politician or agenda.
The best way to stop the chronic Trump attacks on the veracity of CNN is not to unleash a rude and boisterous @Acosta to argue endlessly with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but simply to ensure that CNN news reports are fact-checked and not in need of retractions or firings...
And that CNN hosts, contributors, and anchors do not stoop to profanity, scatology, racism, and ahistorical comparisons to Stalin and Hitler, and that CNN’s staff and hosts do not joke about the president being killed through plane crashes and decapitation.
