The US media suffered its most humiliating debacle in ages: now refuses all transparency over what happened
The
real Fake News
Friday
was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a
long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and
CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives
joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was
clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential
news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story
to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of
how it happened.
The
spectacle began on Friday morning at 11 a.m. EST, when the Most
Trusted Name in News spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly
hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that
WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign,
even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before
they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this
would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and,
more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S.
intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian
intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.
This
entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it
had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was
sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” — someone nobody
had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify — to Donald
Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that
WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s
extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 — 10 days
before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online —
and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special,
unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the
Kremlin. [...] There was just one small problem with this story: it
was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours
after CNN broadcast its story — and then hyped it over and over and
over — the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of
the story wrong.
The
email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September
14 — which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published
access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort
of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some
random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at
the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks — as everyone by
then already knew — had publicly promoted. In other words, the
email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.
Full
report:
Comments
Post a Comment