by Walter W. Murray, reporter
CNN spends virtually every minute of every day slamming President Donald Trump.
Now, it looks like the famously biased network can dish it out… but they sure can’t take it!
CNN has quietly admitted that the supposedly crack team it put together to take on Trump and investigate the so-called Russia scandal has failed in a big way.
The unit’s mission statement was: “Seek truth. Break news. Hold the powerful accountable.”
Instead, they were busted publishing lies… the biggest news they “broke” were their own retractions, corrections and apologies… and the only ones held to account were their own reporters, some of whom left the network in shame.
The New York Times reported that this high-profile unit was such an embarrassment to the network that it was practically frozen this summer while managers reviewed all the ways it failed.
It got so ugly that the unit was told to lay off the main story they were supposed to investigate and no longer cover the Russia story.
Maybe there’s a waterskiing squirrel they can report on instead!
All of the Trump-Russia reporting now has to come from their Washington bureau.
Meanwhile, the Times said editors are reviewing the network’s embarrassing string of failures.
They might be busy for a while!
In June, CNN posted an article claiming a “source” told them James Comey would refute President Donald Trump, who had said the disgraced former FBI director told him several times he wasn’t under investigation.
WHOOPS!
He did just the opposite, releasing a statement admitting he did tell Trump – then President-elect – that he was not under investigation.
Earlier his month, it was revealed that Ana Navarro – supposedly one of the network’s token “Republicans” – is actually a DEMOCRATIC donor!
That would explain her constant hateful anti-Trump rants, anyway. But it wouldn’t explain how they can get away with pretending she’s a voice from the right.
Then there are the firings of Kathy Griffin and Reza Aslan for their hate speech directed at the president.
And of course, there’s the incident that appears to have led to the internal soul searching and the investigations unit getting neutered: A false report linking Anthony Scaramucci, who was briefly the White House communications director, to Russia.
The report was so fatally flawed that the CNN powers-that-be rushed to scrub every embarrassing trace of it off the Internet and even apologized to Scaramucci.
The web page that once had the report now says only:
“On June 22, 2017, CNN.com published a story connecting Anthony Scaramucci with investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund. That story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled. CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.”
Notice anything about that? They retracted and apologized, but never spelled out what for.
Journalism experts say CNN’s non-explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test.
“CNN failed in its duty to enlighten the public,” Edward Wasserman, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “Instead, it muddied the waters to correct something and we don’t know what it’s correcting.”
But maybe we have to cut CNN a little slack. They’ve had to issue so many corrections lately, it must be difficult to keep up!
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”