President Trump famously pushed back against their odd and obsessive attacks telling their White House correspondent Jim Acosta that CNN was “fake news” which caused the network to have even more animosity towards the new president.
Just two months after the election, with their reputation in shambles, CNN’s president Jeff Zucker said he felt like his network’s credibility “is higher than ever.”736 Let’s not forget this is the network where host Fareed Zakaria boldly declared just before the election, “Trump will lose, and he will then destroy the Republican Party,”737 and the tone of their coverage as the election approached gave the impression that Hillary’s victory was inevitable.
CNN’s reputation has been so damaged in recent years that host Jake Tapper was singled out by President Obama during the 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner when Obama joked that Tapper left journalism to join CNN.738 Poor Jake even admitted that his own seven-year-old son now calls him ‘fake news’ to taunt him.739
For decades, CNN has been selling their anchors’ likeness and their trademarked logo to be used in fake news segments in Hollywood films.740 CNN’s now defunct show Crossfire recorded a fake segment for Jody Foster’s film Contact (1997); Larry King, once the face of the network, has played himself in various films where he staged discussions to make them look like they were part of his CNN show; Bernard Shaw, the network’s lead news presenter for twenty years, recorded a fake news segment for Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997); and Anderson Cooper recorded a fake news segment for Batman vs. Superman in 2016.741 So at this point it would be inaccurate to say that CNN wasn’t producing fake news, but their unethical and deceptive actions go far beyond scripting fictional news segments for movies.
Like the time they conducted what looked like a live interview via satellite between Ashleigh Banfield and Nancy Grace using the standard split screen display with each of them appearing to be in different parts of the country, but some viewers at home happened to notice that the same cars, trucks, and even a giant bus were seen driving by in the background behind each of them, passing by one person then just a second or two later, the same vehicles would drive right past the other because they were standing right next to one another in the same parking lot.742
After a heroic firefighter saved an infant who had been abandoned in a hot car in a parking lot, he did a live interview with CNN’s sister station HLN while wearing a “Trump” shirt and when the segment was replayed later in the day, which is common for cable news networks, they blurred out his T-shirt!743
CNN was actually sued for reporting what the plaintiff claims was fake news about a hospital he ran as CEO after they aired a story depicting it as having an infant mortality rate of three times the national average, saying they intentionally manipulated statistics.744 Exposing the fake news from CNN could fill an entire book itself, so in this chapter I’ll just cover a few examples and some of the insane things their contributors regularly say. We’ll also look at the claims that CNN has cozied up to dictatorships in hopes of getting interviews or to further CNN’s business interests in certain countries.
Just a few weeks before the election, when Trump was warning about possible hacking of electronic voting machines, CNN ran a story titled, “No, the presidential election can’t be hacked,”745 and dismissed Trump’s concerns, but right after Hillary’s devastating loss they published a story with the headline, “Where’s the outrage over Russia’s hack of the US election?”746
During one of their endless discussions on conspiracy theories about the Trump campaign ‘colluding’ with Russians to ‘steal’ the election from Hillary, they even used B-roll from a video game called Fallout 4 in a segment about “Russian Hackers.”747 B-roll, for those who don’t know, is the stock footage that is played during a news story while the reporter or anchor is talking about it. They literally used a clip from a video game during a ‘news’ story about their ‘Russian collusion’ speculation!
CNN contributor Bob Baer actually wanted an election “do over.” When he mentioned this on air a surprised host asked, “Bob, if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying we should have another election?”
Baer responds, “When a foreign country interferes in your election and the outcome is in doubt, the legitimacy of the government, I don’t know how it works constitutionally, I’m not a lawyer, constitutional lawyer, but I’m deeply disturbed by the fact that the Russians interfered… I don’t see any other way than to vote again.”748
After Trump was elected, CNN’s senior media analyst Brian Stelter asked, “Is this something of a national emergency?” and wondered if journalists were just “afraid to say so.”749 He also asked, “Do citizens in dictatorships recognize what’s happening right here right now?” and wondered “Are they looking at the first two days of the Trump administration and saying, ‘Oh, that’s what my leader does?’”750 Yes, he actually equated President Trump’s inauguration with a dictator taking over.
Then later that day when it was learned that President Trump picked Frank Sinatra’s My Way for the first dance at the Presidential Inaugural Ball, CNN reported that Sinatra’s daughter Nancy was upset that Trump was using her father’s song. The original headline to the story was, “Nancy Sinatra Not Happy Trump Using Father’s Song at Inauguration.”751 She then responded on Twitter saying, “That’s not true. I never said that. Why do you lie, CNN?”752
They then changed the headline and made major changes to the article and added an editor’s note claiming they just “updated” it.753 How could they make such a huge mistake, causing Nancy Sinatra to not only say she never said such a thing, but to call CNN liars? Most likely some editor probably voiced their opinion that they thought she would be upset about Trump’s song choice, or said that they had ‘heard’ she was upset (which was just them hearing someone else’s opinion that she might be) which they then decided to actually publish as if it were a real story.
CNN’s fake news problem dates back at least several years, and one of the prime examples is them perpetuating the ‘hands up don’t shoot’ hoax which largely gave rise to Black Lives Matter. The saying was falsely attributed to Michael Brown, the six-foot-four three hundred pound thug who robbed a convenience store before attacking a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 resulting in him being shot and killed. After covering the protests one night, host Sally Kohn concluded her show saying “We want you to know, that our hearts are out there marching with them,” and then she and her three other panelists all held up their hands in solidarity with the protesters who had adopted the gesture as a symbol of their cause.754
After the investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown was complete, even the most liberal of news outlets admitted the claim that he had his hands up when he was shot was a lie, and that narrative was ranked one of the biggest lies of the year, even by the far left Washington Post.755 The damage had long been done though. ‘Hands up don’t shoot’ had become the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter, and the slogan was printed on signs at protests and on people’s t-shirts; and the lie that Michael Brown was an innocent victim, murdered by a racist police force had taken root.756 Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke would later say that fake news was born in Ferguson when the liberal media propagated the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ lie.”757