THE 10 WORST EXAMPLES OF FAKE NEWS. AND CNN WINS
Only 10? From Glen Greenwald a damning list of fake news fails: "The 10 worst, most embarrassing US media failures on the Trump-Russia-story." Buzzfeed's latest effort - claiming Trump ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress - doesn't even rate as the worst. Has the US media ever been so corrupted by bias and malice?
Fake news winnerOnly 10? From Glen Greenwald a list of fake news failures that damns the US media:
The 10 worst, most embarrassing US media failures on the Trump-Russia-story.
Buzzfeed's latest effort - falsely claiming Trump ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress - doesn't even rate as the worst.
Read the whole thing here, but the headlines alone paint the picture of a US media now grossly corrupted with malice and bias.
Greenwald explains:
Following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused.
His top 10 fake news stories, from bad to worse:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
6. Russia Attacked U.S. “Diplomats” (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)
Here's that fake news winner explained:
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched one of the most humiliating spectaclesin the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public. Within an hour, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to have “independently confirmed” this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC videos here).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their “multiple, independent sources” got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating – and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
CNN has deleted much of its super-heated coverage, but this correction remains:
We can laugh at the sheer incompetence behind all this fake news and even gloat that the fakers now stand humiliated.
But how many people would have read or heard the initial (fake) claims, but not the later corrections?
Here's yet another case to show that the plural of "allegation" is not "proof". Yet to many in the media, it seems it is.
