by Kylie Handler, editor
CNN has had a fair share of scandals in 2017 — and Friday’s fake news was the cherry on top of their heaping pile of lies.
They network eventually corrected their intentionally fake reporting… but made it clear they were not sorry!
Friday, CNN reporter Manu Raju published a bombshell claim suggesting that President Donald Trump, and his son Donald Trump Jr. received an email from WikiLeaks with a decryption key and website address to hacked content by the Democrats, and possibly Russian operatives.
It was all made up.
Raju reported that the email was dated back to Sept. 4, 2016, which implied that then-presidential candidate Trump and his team were provided access to information by Russia that was not yet made public.
Several news outlets including The Daily Caller and The Wall Street Journal published reports that directly contradicted CNN’s report.
The actual email was dated Sept. 14, 2016 — a whole ten days later, and after the information was already public. Once again, the mainstream media was lying to sell a Trump-Russia connection that doesn’t exist.
It quickly became apparent that the network had a major screw up on their hands, so they corrected their story — but they did not retract it.
CNN tweeted out an explanation:
CNN's initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about Wikileaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) December 8, 2017
And the liar himself, Raju, went on to publicly defend his story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qOhvW7nmxk
Following the scandal, CNN’s “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter took a few minutes of his show to cover the story… and it did not go well.
Rather than reporting on how a CNN journalist fed the American people fake information — or dive into the practices and processes of journalism — Stelter interviewed two Trump haters who blamed the whole thing on the president.
Carl Bernstein and David Frum joined Stelter on his show to discuss the scandal, and Berstein claimed “Look, reporters, journalists make mistakes, our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good, especially compared to the record of Donald Trump and his serial lying.”
How ironic that CNN can spread lies about the president and then somehow turn it around and attack him for it. Outrageous!
“Attacking the press is the basic element that too many demagogues in our culture have used to whip up this cold civil war, and especially to appeal to the base of the President of the United States,” he added.
And then came Frum with his stunning opinion: “The mistakes are precisely the reason the people should trust the media,” he said.
The worst part of the whole scandal is that CNN has shown they are not even sorry for their false report!
A CNN spokeswoman says there will not be disciplinary action in this case because, unlike with Brian Ross/ABC, @MKRaju followed the editorial standards process. Multiple sources provided him with incorrect info.
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 8, 2017
That’s right. Despite being caught making up key facts in a story, CNN has chosen not to discipline Raju for lying.
How will Americans ever trust the media when they repeatedly lie… and refuse to apologize for it!?
CNN needs to be taken off of the air…. now!
–Kylie Handler is a new editor for The Horn News