More Fake News from CNN

This is all over conservative outlets, but we’ll repeat it here in order to keep a complete trail of fake news from the anti-Trump mainstream media. From Greenwald in The Intercept:

CNN, Credibly Accused of Lying to its Audience About a Key Claim in its Blockbuster Cohen Story, Refuses to Comment

Photo: YouTube/CNN CNN’S BLOCKBUSTER July 26 story – that Michael Cohen intended to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he was present when Donald Trump was told in advance about his son’s Trump Tower meeting with various Russians – includes a key statement about its sourcing that credible reporting now suggests was designed to have misled its audience. Yet CNN simply refuses to address the serious ethical and journalistic questions raised about its conduct.

The substance of the CNN story itself regarding Cohen – which made headline news all over all the world and which CNN hyped as a “bombshell” – has now been retracted by other news outlets that originally purported to “confirm” CNN’s story. That’s because the anonymous source for this confirmation, Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis, now admits that, in essence, his “confirmation” was false. As a result, both the Washington Post and the NY Post outed Davis as their anonymous source and then effectively retracted their stories “confirming” parts of CNN’s report.

CNN, however, has retracted nothing. All inquiries to the network are directed to a corporate spokesperson, who simply says: “We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it.” A newsletter sent Sunday night from CNN’s two media reporters, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, contained the same corporate language, but addressed none of the questions raised about CNN’s report.

It’s certainly possible that CNN had other sources for this story besides Davis, who now repudiates it. It’s hard to see how CNN’s story could be true given that Davis, Cohen’s own lawyer, explicitly says that Cohen has no information that Trump had prior knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting, that Cohen cannot and will not tell Mueller that this happened, and that Davis’ prior claims about Cohen’s knowledge and intentions are false.

But that’s not the part that indicates CNN’s dishonesty.

But there’s an entirely separate, and more significant, question about CNN’s behavior here; namely, the very specific claim they made about their sourcing for that blockbuster story. Last night, BuzzFeed reported that Davis explicitly confessed that he was one of the anonymous sources for CNN’s July 26 story, just as he was for the stories from the Washington Post and the New York Post. Last week, CNN put Davis on the air with Anderson Cooper to deny that he was the source for that CNN story – a denial Cooper did not contest – but Davis now admits he was one of CNN’s sources, if not their main source.

Yet remarkably, CNN, in its July 26 story, specificaly claimed that Davis refused to talk to CNN about the story or provide any comment whatsoever.

Only one of two things can be true here, and either is extremely significant: (1) CNN deliberately lied to its audience about Davis refusing to comment on the story when, in fact, Davis was one of the anonymous sources on which the CNN report depended, and CNN claimed Davis refused to comment in order to hide Davis’ identity as one of their anonymous sources; or (2) Davis is lying now to BuzzFeed when he confessed to having been one of CNN’s sources for the story.

How can CNN possibly justify refusing to address these questions, and refrain from informing the public about these critical matters on a story that they themselves hyped for days as a “blockbuster,” one of the most significant stories yet in the Trump/Russia saga?

The media have long had a liberal bias. But the bias against Donald Trump exceeds anything in modern history. Trump himself eggs it on by his attacks on the media, which have the effect of causing them to abandon journalists standards. Which in turn plays into Trump’s hand.

More Fake News

We have chronicled the massive parade of bogus anti-Trump stories in multiple blog posts.

More Fake News About Donald Trump: A Compliation

From the blog of Sharyl Attkisson, a post titled “52 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List.” A “mistake” might imply normal human fallibility, but the overwhelming majority of the mistakes are in an anti-Trump direction. They are not random incompetence. They are the result of a pervasive bias against Donald Trump.

We can’t repeat them all here (please read the entire list), but we can mention a few of the most serious ones.

1. Aug. 2016-Nov. 2016:
The New York Post published modeling photos of Trump’s wife Melania and reported they were taken in 1995. Various news outlets relied on that date to imply that Melania—an immigrant—had violated her visa status. But the media got the date wrong. Politico was among the news agencies that later issued a photo date correction.

7. Jan. 20, 2017:
Zeke Miller of TIME reported that President Trump had removed the bust statue of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. The news went viral. It was false.

8. Jan. 26, 2017:
Josh Rogin of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “entire senior administrative team” had resigned in protest of Trump. A number of media outlets ranging from politically left to right, including liberal-leaning Vox, stated that claim was misleading or wrong.

12. Feb. 2, 2017:
AP reported that Trump had threatened the president of Mexico with invasion to get rid of “bad hombres.” Numerous publications followed suit. The White House said it wasn’t true and the Washington Post removed the AP info that “could not be independently confirmed.”

14. Feb. 14, 2017:
The New York Times’ Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo reported about supposed contacts between Trump campaign staff and “senior Russian intelligence officials.” Comey later testified “In the main, [the article] was not true.”

15. Feb. 22, 2017:
ProPublica’s Raymond Bonner reported CIA official Gina Haspel—Trump’s later pick for CIA Director—was in charge of a secret CIA prison where Islamic extremist terrorist Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, and that she mocked the prisoner’s suffering. More than a year later, ProPublica retracted the claim, stating that “Neither of these assertions is correct…Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended.”

17. May 10, 2017:
Multiple outlets including Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, AP, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported the same leaked information: that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey shortly after Comey requested additional resources to investigate Russian interference in the election. [. . .] The Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said the media reports were untrue and McCabe added that the FBI’s Russia investigation was “adequately resourced.”

18. June 4, 2017:
NBC News reported in a Tweet that Russian President Vladimir Putin told TV host Megan Kelly that he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite: that he did not have compromising information on Trump.

22. June 22, 2017:
CNN’s Thomas Frank reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The report was later retracted. Frank and two other CNN employees resigned in the fallout.

23. December 2, 2017:
ABC News’ Brian Ross reported that former Trump official Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was going to testify that candidate Trump had directed him to contact “the Russians.” Even though such contact would not be in of itself a violation of law, the news was treated as an explosive indictment of Trump in the Russia collusion narrative, and the stock market fell on the news. ABC later corrected the report to reflect that Trump had already been elected when he reportedly asked Flynn to contact the Russians about working together to fight ISIS and other issues. Ross was suspended.

27. Sept. 5, 2017:
CNN’s Chris Cillizza and other news outlets declared Trump “lied” when he stated that Trump Tower had been wiretapped, although there’s no way any reporter independently knew the truth of the matter—only what intel officials claimed. It later turned out there were numerous wiretaps involving Trump Tower, including a meeting of Trump officials with a foreign dignitary. At least two Trump associates who had offices in or frequented Trump Tower were also wiretapped.

29. Nov. 6, 2017:
CNN’s Daniel Shane edited excerpts from a Trump event to make it seem as though Trump didn’t realize Japan builds cars in the U.S. However, Trump’s entire statement made clear that he does.

35. Dec. 8, 2017:
CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb reported that Donald Trump Jr. conspired with WikiLeaks in advance of the publication of damaging Democrat party and Clinton campaign emails. Many other publications followed suit. They had the date wrong: WikiLeaks and Trump Junior were in contact after the emails were published.

40. March 8, 2018:
The New York Times’ Jan Rosen reported on a hypothetical family whose tax bill would rise nearly $4,000 under Trump’s tax plan. It turns out the calculations were off: the couple’s taxes would go actually go down $43; not up $4,000.

44. April 30, 2018:
AP reported that the NRA had banned guns during Trump and Pence speeches at the NRA’s annual meeting. AP later corrected the information because the ban had been put in place by Secret Service.

46. May 7, 2018:
CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger reported that Trump’s personal lawyer, Cohen, paid $1 million in fines related to unauthorized cars in his taxi business, had been barred from managing taxi medallions, had transferred $60 million offshore to avoid paying debts, and is awaiting trial on charges of failing to pay millions in taxes. A later correction stated that none of that was true.

47. May 16, 2018:
The New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis, AP, CNN’s Oliver Darcy and others excerpted a Trump comment as if he had referred to immigrants or illegal immigrants generally as “animals.” Most outlets corrected their reports later to note that Trump had specifically referred to members of the murderous criminal gang MS-13.

48. May 28, 2018
The New York Times’ Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and CNN’s Hadas Gold shared a story with photos of immigrant children in cages as if they were new photos taken under the Trump administration. The article and photos were actually taken in 2014 under the Obama administration.

49. May 29, 2018
The New York Times’ Julie Davis reported the estimated size of a Trump rally to be 1,000 people. There were actually 5,500 people or more in attendance.

51. June 21, 2018
Time magazine and others used a photo of a crying Honduran child to illustrate a supposed Trump administration policy separating illegal immigrant parents and children. The child’s father later reported that agents had never separated her from her mother; the mother had taken her to the US without his knowledge and separated herself from her other children, whom she left behind.

Conclusion

A few of the items on Attkisson’s list are fairly trivial, such as 16. (“An article bylined by the New York Times’ graphic editors Karen Yourish and Troy Griggs referred to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, as Trump’s wife.”)

One or two others represent honest assessments that turned out to be wrong, for example 3. (“In a Washington Post piece not labelled opinion or analysis, Stuart Rothenberg reported that Trump’s path to an electoral college victory was ‘nonexistent.’”). Rothenberg, a relatively sober analyst, was probably fairly describing the data he had at the time.

But the vast majority of examples Attkisson cites are not random errors, the result of the fact that journalists are fallible. They are evidence of a mainstream media keen to find, and disinclined to check out, anything that reflects badly on Donald Trump.

Fake News About Donald Trump: A Compliation

Donald Trump says outrageous things, and attacks the media. That might seem to be a hugely dysfunctional presidential style. But in fact he has driven the media bonkers, causing them to publish a flurry of badly sourced and easily debunked stories about Trump, thus validating his attacks. If Trump were intentionally trying to trap them, this would be a brilliant strategy. He’s not, or course. He’s just being Donald Trump.

First, from The Federalist:

13 More Major Fake News Stories In Just Five Months Of Trump’s Presidency

You can read all the details here, but this is the list.

• January 22: The Trump-Comey Bromance
• February 1: Neil Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever’ Club
• February 17: The Mobilization of the National Guard
• February 25: Kuwait’s Pay-to-Play at Trump Hotel
• April 11: The Jeff Sessions ‘Filth’ Scandal
• May 1: Ghosts of Billboards Past
• May 3: The DOJ Prosecutes a Woman for Laughing
• May 4: The Nonexistent Beer Party
• May 4: ‘Rape Is a Preexisting Condition’
• May 4: The Football Analogy Fiasco
• May 10: The Fake Rosenstein Resignation Scandal
• May 10: Comey’s Russian Probe Resource Request
• May 20: The ‘Ivanka Charity’ Insanity

This article in The Federalist is a follow-up to an earlier one titled “16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won.” That’s right: getting called out on a whole bunch of earlier bogus stories has not seemed to engender any journalistic integrity in the media.

Yet More Fake News

One might think that the above list of thirteen bogus stories (added to the earlier sixteen reported by The Federalist) would pretty much exhaust the universe of such blunders by major “mainstream” outlets. Alas, this is what fighter pilots call a “target rich environment,” and the Daily Caller had no trouble coming up with “7 Times CNN Botched The News In 2017.” That’s right: just CNN.

• Comey Testimony
• CNN Smears Scaramucci
• CNN Spreads Fake News…About Fake News!
• Republican Donor Did (Not) Fund The Dossier
• Fake (Fish) News
• Trump Is (Not) Ignorant Of Japanese Cars
• CNN Botches Another ‘Bombshell’

The “bombshell” was from this last Friday.

Perhaps the most jarring error in the CNN report is the date on which members of the Trump Organization, including Donald Trump and Trump Jr., were sent the email. The network reported that a person named Mike Erickson sent the email on Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to Wikileaks documents as well as a decryption key to access them.

Yes! Collusion!

Except that the actual date on the e-mail was September 14, after WikiLeaks had publicly announced the availability of the documents, and published the decryption key. In short, somebody simply e-mailed Trump, Jr. with publicly available information. Some scandal.

CNN still has the story online, with a weaselly “correction.”

CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 — 10 days earlier — based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.

No, not “less significant.” Utterly meaningless.

Three in One Week

Yes, Axios reports three media screw-ups in one week, only one of which duplicates something above:

• Flynn’s testimony: Last Friday, ABC News reported that former national security advisor Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that President Trump, while still a candidate, directed him to contact Russian officials. But later in the day, the network issued a “clarification” that the direction came when Trump was president-elect. That changed the impact of the story entirely as it’s a common occurrence for presidential transition teams to reach out to foreign governments.
• Deutsche Bank subpoena: Reuters and Bloomberg both reported on Tuesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for information on accounts relating to President Trump and his family members — seemingly confirming that Mueller had expanded his probe to investigate the president’s financial dealings. The WSJ defused that bombshell in a follow-up report stating that the subpoenas actually dealt with “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”
• WikiLeaks emails: CNN reported this morning that senior Trump campaign officials, including Trump himself, received an email from an unknown sender on September 4, 2016 that linked them to what could have been unreleased WikiLeaks documents. WaPo issued their own report later in the afternoon that the email was actually sent on September 14 — and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier.

Conclusion

As Peggy Noonan has noted “Trump Has Been Lucky in His Enemies.” The subhead reads: “Cursing pols, screeching students and intolerant abortion advocates have become the face of the left.” Mainstream media types may be a bit less strident (on average), but they have also made themselves into enemies Trump is lucky to have.

Trump, Fake News and the Mainstream Media

From Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept: a rundown of bogus stories that mainstream media outlets have run about Donald Trump. Those include:

• A CNN story about a supposed Congressional investigation of a link between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund.
• Another CNN story claiming that James Comey, in testimony before Congress, was going to contradict Trump’s claim that Comey assured the President he was not being investigated by the FBI.
• A Washington Post story, based on anonymous sources, that Russian hackers had hacked into the “U.S. electricity grid,” supposedly through a Vermont utility.
• Another Washington Post article about a supposed 213 million times that stories emanating from a Russian “disinformation campaign” had been viewed by American readers. The source was a shadowy group of self-appointed experts who had compiled a McCarthyite blacklist of sites that supposedly published Russian propaganda. The story had to be retracted.
• Liberal website Slate published an article claiming the discovery of a secret server used by the Trump Organization to communicate with a Russian bank.
• C-SPAN made a splash when it claimed that “RT programming” had interrupted its broadcasts. Since RT is owned by the Russian government, this played into the Russian narrative, but it was untrue.
• The leftist Guardian published a story asserting that WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, had “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.”
• A bogus claim from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that Russian Military Intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers was hyped by multiple outlets.

Greenwald notes:

WHAT IS MOST notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all of the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the byproduct of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.

Greenwald goes on to discuss business incentives to hype Russia, which are most certainly real.

What he does not give sufficient attention is ideological bias.

Donald Trump and Fake News

That the media have a bias against Trump is blatantly obvious. What is less commented on is that Trump’s attacks on the “lying media” may be self-fulfilling assertions.

The media, chafing under those charges, appear to be itching to get back at Trump by implicating him in some nefarious conspiracy with Russia. Journalistic standards go by the board.

There is a lot wrong with Donald Trump as president, but he has one huge political asset: he drives his political adversaries utterly bonkers. He has gone far in discrediting his mainstream media enemies. And not because people simply believe Trump when he calls them liars, but because during Trump’s presidency they have published a lot of lies.

Mainstream Media Turning Skeptical on Campus Rape Moral Panic?

It may just be a blip, or it may be a turning point, but Newsweek has come out with an article that takes a rather skeptical view of the notion that a rape epidemic afflicts college campuses. Focusing on Paul Nungesser, the man who was falsely accused of rape by “mattress girl” (Emma Sulkowicz), it details how rape accusations that were rejected by Columbia University, and by prosecutors in New York City because the convenient politically correct truth for social justice warriors, and much of the mainstream media.

It also details how accused males are increasingly suing when they are denied due process rights in campus kangaroo courts, and pressing claims of sex discrimination. From guys assumed to be guilty simply because they are male, such claims are plausible.

CNN

On the other hand we have CNN, which aired “The Hunting Ground” — a documentary that accepts all the standard cant about a “rape culture” and a “rape epidemic.” Robbie Soave of Reason debunks the whole enterprise, showing that it is a piece of advocacy rather than journalism. And indeed, 19 Harvard Law professors (not a particularly conservative bunch) condemned the documentary for distorting the facts about a Harvard student. Even the liberal Slate published a critique of the film.

Liberal Hypocrisy

It is interesting that liberals, who have always been scrupulous about due process and “innocent until proven guilty” where robberies, ordinary assaults, murders and all other sorts of crimes are concerned, should suddenly junk all that when rape is the issue. What we have here, of course, is a set of social biases, rather than a set of principled convictions. Liberals want to view ordinary criminals as victims of social injustice. But white males on campus, being the stereotyped oppressor group, need swift, summary, harsh justice. And given that they are white males, we need not worry excessively about whether they actually did what they were accused of.

Ted Turner: Iraqi Terrorists “Patriots”

Via Newsbusters, the CNN founder and ageing media mogul lets some of his opinions fly.

Interviewed Tuesday for Charlie Rose’s PBS show, CNN founder Ted Turner argued that inaction on global warming “will be catastrophic” and those who don’t die “will be cannibals.” He also applied moral equivalence in describing Iraqi insurgents as “patriots” who simply “don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country” and so “if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we’d be doing the same thing.” On not taking drastic action to correct global warming:

Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.

Turner ridiculed the need for a big U.S. military, insisting “China just wants to sell us shoes. They’re not building landing craft to attack the United States,” and “even with our $500 billion military budget, we can’t win in Iraq. We’re being beaten by insurgents who don’t even have any tanks.” After Rose pointed out the Iraqi insurgents “have a lot of roadside bombs that kill a lot of Americans” and wondered “where do you think they come from?”, Turner answered:

I think that they’re patriots and that they don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we’d be doing the same thing: we’d be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded.

As for the fact that we are “occupying” Iraq: we occupied Germany at the end of World War II. Had there been a Nazi “insurgency” would any Americans have described the insurgents as “patriots?”

One could argue, of course, that Turner’s opinions don’t matter much anymore. But if he had made pro-Nazi statements or racist statements, the media feeding frenzy would last a week.

Instead, these kinds of comments from a rich leftist are just a big ho-hum.

CNN’s “Undecided Voters” Were Actually Democratic Shills

Via Real Debate Wisconsin, an account of how CNN had “undecided voters” ask Hillary questions in the Las Vegas Democratic debate.

Just how “undecided” were they?

They included:

A Democratic Party bigwig
An antiwar activist
A Union official
An Islamic leader
A Harry Reid staffer
A radical Chicano separatist

One could argue, of course, that while all of them were liberals or leftists, at least they might be undecided as between the (entirely left-leaning) Democratic candidates.

But this is implausible. People this politicized have preferences, even this early, and even among rival Democrats.

And if they believed that Hillary is the favorite to win the nomination (a widely held idea) they have a huge incentive to throw her softball questions. The last thing they would want is a tough question leading to something that would hurt her in the General Election.

And further:

After mentioning that the debate was sponsored by the national party — something likely understood by most viewers as a mere formality — he described them as “ordinary people, undecided voters.” Note: not even “undecided Democrats.” Just undecided.

Look for this in the General Election too -- if the networks get to choose the questioners.

Or if a network recruits a group of “undecided” or “middle of the road” or “representative” citizens to comment on the debate. Such a group will (to about a 99% certainty) think the Democrat did better.