(Natural News) Earlier this week a senior producer for CNN admitted during an undercover media sting operation by Project Veritas that most of the network’s coverage of President Donald J. Trump’s alleged election “collusion” with Russia was “bulls**t.” “I mean, it’s mostly bulls**t right now,” said John Bonifield. “Like, we don’t have any giant proof.”
Nevertheless, the network’s ratings are good right now – because it is peddling Trump hate and there will always be a portion of the country that will lap it up — so it’s onward and upward with the Russia-Trump hoax.
“It’s a business, people are like the media has an ethical phssssss… All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you’re just like, that’s adorable. That’s adorable. This is a business,” Bonifield also said, which is a frank admission that the network distinctly lacks ethics in its coverage. (Related: CNN credibility collapses under weight of fake news scandal… “no longer a news organization”.)
He noted further:
Then they say, well there’s still an investigation going on. And you’re like, yeah, I don’t know. If they were finding something we would know about it. The way these leaks happen, they would leak it. They’d leak. If it was something really good, it would leak…. The leaks keep leaking and there’s so many great leaks, and it’s amazing. I just refuse to believe that if they had something really good like that that wouldn’t leak because we’ve been getting all these other leaks.
So, devoid of any real evidence that Trump or his inner circle has done anything nefarious involving the Russians, CNN has had to invent stories, allegations and innuendo — because it’s good for business, not because the network is interested in good, factual journalism.
As Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept notes:
Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.
With that in mind, and as our own contribution to legitimate journalism, we thought it important to provide readers with a so of CNN ‘Hall of Shame’ collection of the more outrageous, Trump-hate-driven lies the network has published since Trump won in November:
— The most recent example of CNN story fabrication involved Anthony Scaramuci, a member of Trump’s transition team, as well as a a fundraiser and advisor for his campaign. The network published an unsubstantiated story from an “anonymous” source claiming that Scaramuci was under congressional investigation by the Senate for allegedly discussing sanctions with Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the $10 billion Russian Direct Investment Fund just four days before the president’s inauguration. It didn’t happen; CNN was forced to retract the story.
The Trump hate at CNN started long before this week, however:
— August 10, 2016: CNN reported that the Secret Service spoke to the Trump campaign about the then-GOP nominee’s comment regarding the Second Amendment. He said: “Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” It was misconstrued (intentionally) to suggest Trump was calling for armed rebellion against Clinton if she won and began appointing Left-wing Supreme Court justices. It didn’t happen.
— September 29, 2016: The network reported that talk radio shock jock Howard Stern said Trump expressed support for the Iraq war on his show in 2002. Stern later denied the CNN report and said he doesn’t know “how CNN came up with” it’s headline that Stern “confirmed” Trump’s support. Trump denied it.
— October 2016: Network Leftie host Chris Cuomo, in riffing on WikiLeaks’ steady release of damning emails about Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, told his audience it was illegal for ordinary folks to view those documents, so people would have to rely only on the media to tell them what’s in them (or not tell them). A noted legal expert debunked Cuomo.
— October 30, 2016: The network accused Trump of “encouraging” voters to cast more than one ballot, because he voiced skepticism of mail-in ballots (check the URL of this website, which syndicated the original CNN story, and you can see what the initial headline said). Not true, and the network eventually rewrote the headline and added an editor’s note at the bottom of the original story, claiming the change “more accurately” reflected Trump’s real comments.
— November 22, 2016: During a daytime broadcast, CNN contributor Charles Kaiser claimed that Trump “should never ask his supporters to give the Nazi salute, which he did at a rally in March. That’s not a good idea…” When challenged, he added, “In March he asked his supporters to raise and pledge their support to his candidacy and pledge their support for him. There’s plenty of video of that.” Except, that is not what Trump was doing, calling it ridiculous.
— January 20, 2017: On Inauguration Day, the Trump transition team utilized an old Frank Sinatra hit, “My Way,” in some festivities. CNN reported that his daughter, Nancy Sinatra, of “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” fame, was not happy about it. She tweeted out later, “That’s not true. I never said that. Why do you lie CNN?” Later CNN updated the piece without explanation.
— January 20, 2017: The network ran a story claiming that Trump’s then-pick for secretary of education, school-choice advocate Betsy DeVos, said that ‘guns should be in schools to protect students from grizzly bears.’ What she really said: During her confirmation hearing was in response to a question about whether schools should have guns on campus; responding to the question, she noted that the issue was “best left to locales and states to decide,” not Washington bureaucrats. She then noted that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect students from roaming wildlife, adding, “I would imagine there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies,” some of which do in fact live in Wyoming.
— January 31, 2017: In the lead-up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court pick, network White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny claimed via Twitter that the Trump administration was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest,” setting up identical Twitter pages for the two most likely nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman. It was a sneering tweet meant to make the White House look unflattering. But 30 minutes later he was forced to retract his earlier tweet, saying, “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” The initial lying tweet was shared more than 1,100 times; the correction only about 150 times, leaving far too many people with the impression that his first one was true.
Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, observed this week regarding CNN’s disgustingly frequent fake news regarding all things Trump, as well the other usual suspects:
Through revelations like these, the credibility of CNN, NYT and the Washington Post has utterly collapsed. Only complete fools believe anything they read in these fiction rags. Time after time, these publications have been caught fabricating “anonymous sources” to spin the stories they want to publish, even when those stories are knowingly false.
Rarely do the stories get retracted, and for every retraction that does take place, there are a thousand other fake news stories published on their websites that never get removed or corrected. The mainstream media has literally become the very FAKE NEWS they accused the independent media of pushing.
No truer words.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
Sources include:
