Long Gone

Many years ago I was on business in Atlanta and had a few hours to spare. I decided to take a tour on CNN headquarters, then a respected 24-hour news outlet. I even bought a CNN hat and wore it proudly during the cold winters in New England.

Today, CNN has devolved into a pathetic media joke — biased, inaccurate, doctrinaire and populated by talking heads who are, to put it kindly, not very smart.

CNN is obsessed with the phony Russian collusion narrative and spends hours on it, often promoting fake news in an effort to make their hysterical condemnation of Donald Trump appear to have substance.

Mollie Hemingway writes:

Early on Friday, CNN promoted its latest breathless report purporting to show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. CNN has been extremely invested in the narrative of collusion for the last year.

In June, CNN was forced to pull one of its Russia-Trump conspiracy stories that “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.” The discredited story was based on a single anonymous source who connected Anthony Scaramucci, a prominent ally of President Trump, to a Russian investment fund managed by a Kremlin-controlled bank. Three journalists who worked on the story were fired.

But many of the other stories CNN pushed had serious problems, including one that claimed fired FBI head Jim Comey would testify he never told President Trump three times that he was not under FBI investigation. That’s precisely what he testified the next morning after the story ran. Still other stories are headlined explosively and presented on-air breathlessly while being quite anodyne. Earlier this week, was a piece headlined, “Exclusive: Previously undisclosed emails show follow-up after Trump Tower meeting.” The piece quietly revealed that Trump Jr. didn’t receive the follow-up and the “follow-up” was in no way incriminating or suggesting treasonous collusion to steal an election. Such stories have been par for the course for the Russia-Trump collusion narrative.

Friday morning’s report — which got the usual suspects extremely excited — was one such story. Broadcast widely on air and online, it intimated that Donald Trump, Jr. was given an advance notice about documents hacked or phished from Democrats before they were publicly available. The story didn’t include any evidence that the random dude who emailed Trump, Jr. was correct, that his email had been opened, that he was connected to Russia, or anything else to justify the excitement that those all-in on the collusion narrative had in response to it.

CNN has become the poster child for fake news. Driven by its internal left-wing bias and its resultant hatred of Donald Trump, it will publish any story that fits its warped narrative—even when the story is dead wrong.

My CNN hat is long gone. So is CNN as a respected member of the journalistic community.

UPDATE:
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Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has done more to ruin the reputation of many mainstream media outlets than anything that Donald Trump could possibly tweet. In fact, Trump's tweets about "fake news" have proved to be so accurate that the media's repeated denials and near-hysterical defensiveness have become laughable.

TDS has forced the trained hamsters of the media to fall pray to confirmation bias. They so desperately want their fake new narratives about, say, Russian collusion, to be proven accurate, that they'll report anything that confirms them. No journalistic standards, no verification of source, nada. The problem is that what they report isn't true. Glen Greenwald comments:

FRIDAY WAS ONE of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

There was only one catch—the whole report was phony. CNN was forced to retract the story and other media sources who parroted their report (without proper verification) were as well.

It's fake news all the way down.