One of the first of what would unfortunately become many instances of disturbing crimes being broadcast on Facebook Live was when four black thugs in Chicago broadcast themselves torturing a white mentally handicapped man.819 He was bound, gagged, and had his clothes and hair slashed with a knife. National news outlets were hesitant to report on it at first, and it wasn’t until the horrifying video went viral on social media that the major networks finally mentioned it. But a report that CBS aired about the incident is one of the most misleading segments produced by a national news outlet.
The report aired on CBS radio stations as part of the top of the hour newsbreak and began with the announcer saying, “The viral video of a beating and knife attack in Chicago suggests the assault had racial overtones. CBS’s Dean Reynolds tells us the victim is described as a mentally-challenged teenager. In the video he is choked and repeatedly called the n-word. His clothes are slashed and he is terrorized with a knife. His alleged captors repeatedly reference Donald Trump. Police are holding four people in connection with the attack.”820
While “technically” correct, there couldn’t be a better example of a misleading report. In reality, the victim was white and the perpetrators were black, and while the attackers were “referencing Donald Trump” they were saying “Fuck Donald Trump, and fuck white people.”821 The victim was called a “nigga” because that term, as you likely know, is often used as both an insult and a term of endearment, and yes, black people call white people “nigga” as an insult and to intimidate them.
CBS never apologized for the misleading report after it was denounced online, they just ignored the criticism and pretended like nothing happened. Their report was so backwards that it couldn’t have just been from a producer getting the basic facts wrong◦— it must have taken some serious mental gymnastics for them to twist the story around 180 degrees from what actually happened to give the listeners the impression that a group of racist Donald Trump supporters attacked a black man. The black perpetrators were charged with multiple felonies, including hate crimes for the attack.822
This is far from an isolated incident of CBS presenting stories in a false light to either protect liberals or smear conservatives. For example, CBS doctored an interview with Bill Clinton when he was asked about Hillary’s infamous fainting incident in order to omit Bill’s embarrassing gaffe that such a thing happened “frequently.” On PBS, Charlie Rose asked him if it was something more serious than people thought, and Bill answered, “If it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors, because frequently, not frequently◦— rarely◦— but on more than one occasion over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing has happened to her where she got severely dehydrated.”823
When the same interview aired later that day on CBS, they deceptively edited out the part where Bill said “frequently.” Because it would have been an obvious jump cut, they actually inserted a brief clip of Charlie Rose over the edit as a reaction shot so viewers wouldn’t notice the quick edit.824
CBS News’ Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, who worked for the network for twenty years, resigned in 2014 citing the network’s liberal bias.825 She said that it was a “struggle” to get her reports on the air (i.e., to avoid the censorship of her stories by CBS) and later published a book titled Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington.
In the later part of her career she had investigated the Benghazi attack as well as Operation Fast and Furious, a covert gun-running scheme which transferred weapons to Mexican drug cartels in what many believe was a false flag operation to then blame American gun stores for firearms ending up in the hands of narco groups.826 So, Sharyl wasn’t just a reporter, she was investigating some very serious scandals the Obama administration didn’t want people to know about. A year before her resignation she had learned, and CBS News confirmed, that her computer had been hacked into by a sophisticated hacker on multiple occasions when she was investigating the Benghazi cover-up.827
CBS confirmed, “Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data. This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion. CBS News is taking steps to identify the responsible party and their method of access.”828
Just a month earlier it was revealed that Obama’s Justice Department had secretly obtained the emails and phone records of Fox News’ White House correspondent James Rosen trying to find out who his sources were. So it’s likely that some Deep State operatives in the NSA or CIA were snooping around in Sharyl Attkisson’s computer to see what she was working on and who she was talking to.829 The CIA admits they hacked into the computers of members of the Senate Intelligence Committee when they were investigating the CIA’s detention and interrogations programs under the Bush administration.830 Again, they wanted to know who their sources were and how much they knew.
So if the CIA would illegally hack into computers of the very Congressmen who are tasked with overseeing their activities, why wouldn’t they hack into the computers of reporters who are also investigating their unethical and illegal actions? The fact that these crimes are all but ignored by mainstream news networks shows that they are complicit in the cover-up.
Just two months before the 2004 Presidential Election, CBS’s show 60 Minutes aired a fake news story about George W. Bush’s military service record based on forged documents. The fake documents cast doubt on the quality of Bush’s service in the Air National Guard and indicated he was given preferential treatment. Various bloggers immediately began scrutinizing them and found inconsistencies in the jargon as well as the typography between the fonts used in the documents versus the fonts that actual documents of that kind had.
If real, they would have been typed in the 1970s, but appeared to have been created using Microsoft Word. For two weeks CBS anchor Dan Rather stuck by his story but skepticism from those on the Internet kept growing, causing other news outlets to cover the controversy, and so CBS reluctantly had to finally address it.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward said, “Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.”831
Dan Rather would later say, “If I knew then what I know now◦— I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.”832 The documents, it turns out, were a dirty political trick that CBS either willfully or negligently fell for.
As I mentioned in the introduction of this book, when CBS’s flagship show 60 Minutes did an ‘investigation’ into fake news they featured several websites as examples which were actually parody and satire sites, not actual fake news sites. Who could possibly not get the humor in a headline like, “After Colonoscopy Reveals Brain Tumor, Donald Trump Drops from Race” or reading the first two sentences in the article about “Donald Trump Caught Snorting Cocaine by Hotel Staff” where the ‘eyewitness’ says she mistook a dog lying on the floor for Donald Trump’s hair!? To call parody and humor sites ‘fake news’ sites is not only disingenuous but it waters down the entire argument of those who are supposedly trying to prevent fake news from spreading.