Project Veritas has released more than 100 hours of secretly recorded audio from CNN’s Atlanta headquarters. The recordings — made in 2009 — demonstrate the liberal bias, dishonest reporting, and lack of journalistic integrity at the media outlet President Trump has consistently called “fake news.” This first WikiLeaks-style dump is only the first half of what Project Veritas obtained from a source identified only as “Miss X.”
Project Veritas was founded by James O’Keefe in 2010 to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.” O’Keefe is perhaps most famous for exposing ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in 2009 with a series of videos showing the organization’s willingness to participate and assist in illegal activity. ACORN — where President Obama got his start as a community organizer — lost federal funding and most of its private funding as a result of those videos and — after 40 years — closed its doors in 2010. At the same time ACORN was imploding, the man responsible for that implosion was launching Project Veritas.
Since its founding, Project Veritas has exposed corruption in left-leaning organizations, including voter fraud by Democrats.
Now, Project Veritas has the liberal mainstream media in its sights. The night before the inauguration of President Trump, O’Keefe told a crowd at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “Everyone’s saying, ‘Who are you going after next?’ I’m going to tell you right now — I’ll make it public — I’m going after the media next.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf-0_dFnl-Y?ecver=1
Following up on that promise, Project Veritas released 119 hours of raw audio in a WikiLeaks-style dump on Tuesday and says it has “over 100 more hours still yet to be released.” According to the Project Veritas website, “The tapes contain soundbites from current and previous CNN employees Joe Sterling, Arthur Brice, and Nicky Robertson, as well as numerous others” that demonstrate — among other things — the lack of journalistic integrity at CNN, which lends itself to producing reports so skewed and lacking in honesty that they can only be described as “fake news.”
The recordings are from 2009 and show that the trend in dishonest reporting that President Trump has been calling out since he was candidate Trump is not a new development. As an example of this, the website contains the following transcript from a recording of “Miss X” discussing with Arthur Brice (who is now an executive editor at CNN) the fact that a poll CNN was preparing to report was outdated, since new polls showed different results:
Miss X: “I read a CNN poll that was taken on June 26 and 28th, and I know that the hearing for the case, the fire fighters case was on the 29th, so the poll was done right before it, and those are still the poll results we’re reporting, so I asked someone in DC who does the poll results about why we hadn’t updated it, and said there were a few newer polls from last week and the week before and there’s CBS news polls and a Rasmussen poll, and he said we don’t use Rasmussen, and I said does CNN plan to do another poll if we’re only using that. He said we’re not going to be doing another poll, those are the results we’ll be using. So I don’t see how that’s reporting all sides because that poll said hold for release until Friday the 10th.”
Arthur Brice: “Who did you talk with?”
Miss X: “Paul [CNN’s deputy political director Paul Steinhauser].”
Arthur Brice: “Yeah, he’s your director. Yeah, he’s pretty high up in the food chain. I agree. I think it’s dishonest to use outdated information if new information shows something that is in variance with what you’re reporting. It’s just, it’s dishonest.”
Yet, even though it was “dishonest to use outdated information if new information shows something that is in variance with what you’re reporting,” that is exactly what the leadership of CNN decided to do.
And this was not a one-off, either, “Miss X” also provided another recording showing CNN reporting what were known at the time to be inaccurate poll numbers about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in 2009. In this recording “Miss X is having a very similar conversation with Joe Sterling, news desk editor at CNN’s The Wire. The result was the same. CNN’s leadership made the decision to run with an outdated and misleading poll:
Miss X: “This wasn’t released until two weeks after. So can we say a newly released poll?”
Joe Sterling: “No, you can’t say that. You can’t say that at all. This isn’t a newly released.”
Miss X: “But it says newly released on Friday.”
Joe Sterling: “I know, how did we write about this? Did we write a wire about this?
Miss X: Yeah, I think the wires and I did some Googling and found that it said according to a CNN poll people were saying this recently that her approval ratings are 47 percent.
The recording goes on to include this later part of the conversation:
Miss X: “But I thought that if someone saw this they might think that. And they’re thinking, oh, they’re using an outdated poll that was done before a major event happened that would change how people thought of her.
Joe Sterling: “I’d have to see how we wrote about it. I don’t think we stand to change how people think of her [Sotomayor]. Geez, I mean if someone picked this up it’s not going to change — it’s not going to change anybody’s opinion.”
So, rather than look at the most recent poll numbers to decide how CNN should report, Sterling said he would want to look at what CNN had written previously — before the new poll numbers were available — in deciding the editorial slant of any new reporting. His reason: “I don’t think we stand to change how people think of her [Sotomayor].” Journalistic integrity is not about changing how people view a particular Supreme Court justice (it is difficult to say whether the timeline in the recording is during her nomination or after she assumed office). It is about reporting accurately, regardless of the facts. The opposite of that is the creation of “fake news.”
Sterling’s willingness to bend the truth past the breaking point is likely fueled by his antipathy of anything conservative. Or religious. In another recording, Sterling compared those who dispute the theory of man-made climate change to those who — for religious reasons — dispute the theory of evolution. He said:
That issue, climate change, I mean science is pretty much on board and there are a few dissenters. There’s no debate. It’s like you know, born-agains saying there’s a debate over, you know creationism, and all that stuff. There is no debate.
One would think that as a journalist, Sterling would own a dictionary. If he does, he should look up the definition of “debate.” Because there certainly is a debate about both climate change and evolution/creationism.
The bias at CNN does not restrict itself to conservatism and religion. There is also an apparent bias against America itself.
In one recording, Nicky Robertson, assignment desk editor at CNN, said, “Fox News, I think Fox News is unbearable. It’s horrible.” So far, so fair. After all, an opinion is just an opinion. This writer thinks many news organizations are unbearable and horrible. If Robertson had stopped there — without giving a basis for his hatred of Fox News, he would have been merely expressing an opinion. But he did not stop there. He added, “Fox News is so American.” Because, in the anti-American mindset of the liberal mainstream media of which CNN is a cornerstone, being American apparent is a bad thing.
So, it appears that at among the folks at CNN, there is a lack of journalistic integrity that allows the bending of truth, skewing of numbers, and creation of “fake news.” And it appears that both God and Country are the recipients of animosity. Well, at least they left apple pie alone.
