While CNN president Jeff Zucker says that viewers trust his network “more than ever,” now there’s even less reason to do so. In the wake of CNN’s recent scandal, in which it was caught knowingly peddling fake news, it now has done it again, presenting on air a fake National Enquirer cover as real.
The embarrassing error occurred during Jake Tapper’s Friday broadcast, which “reported on claims that the White House had told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to apologize for his negative coverage or suffer a National Enquirer ‘exposé’ on their lives,” reported the Daily Mail. The paper continued:
Unfortunately, the National Enquirer cover that was picked to illustrate the magazine’s often salacious content was completely fake, Page Six reported.
The cover — which may have been created as clickbait according to Page Six — promises a “Presidential shocker!”
Dated April 16, 2016, it has the cover line ‘Heidi Cruz betrayed by cheating husband!’ and claims ‘sensational photo proof’ of a ‘sordid threesome’ and ‘sleazy love letters.’
It also claimed that Ted Cruz was ‘named in madam’s black book’ and promises ‘the most explosive tell-all interview ever.’
Unfortunately for Tapper, the cover is literally fake news: It was never an actual cover of the newspaper, according to insiders at the National Enquirer.
It’s not known where it originated, but it was shared to Ted Cruz’s Twitter feed by ‘DeplorableTrumpEagle’ in April 2016.
CNN declined to comment to Page Six….
CNN is, however, supposedly taking the matter seriously, referring it the network’s standards and practices department.
Observers may wonder if this department had previously been in mothballs — or what kind of standards it suggests — given the recent CNN journalistic fraud exposed by investigative organization Project Veritas (PV). First a CNN producer, John Bonifield, was caught on hidden camera admitting that the Russia-Donald Trump narrative is “mostly b******t right now” and that “we don’t have any big giant proof” (video below).
Next to make an appearance was CNN political commentator, former Obama administration official and avowed communist Van Jones. He confessed to an undercover PV reporter that the “Russia thing is just a big fat nothing burger” and that the network was just covering it to make money (for “ratings” — video below).
Then there was “Jimmy Carr, associate producer for CNN’s New Day, admitting that CNN has a left-leaning bias and hates President Trump. He also says that American voters are ‘stupid as s**t.’ Furthermore the video shows that CNN practices selective editing to promote a false narrative,’” reported The New American on Friday (video below).
Needless to say, these revelations have hurt CNN’s ratings and further damaged its credibility. Yet an important factor is underemphasized: If CNN knew the Russia story was a hoax — something The New American and other traditionalist sources have been reporting for a long time — other leftist media (virtually all the media), such as the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today and Chicago Tribune, also must have known.
Yet they all had been exploiting the story, apparently as guilty as CNN.
This is no small matter. The Trump-Russia-collusion lie convinced millions of Americans that the election had been “stolen” from their candidate, contributing to the intense anger that sparked rioting, vandalism, attacks on Trump supporters and the June 14 attempted assassination of 10 percent of Republican congressmen by Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson. It has literally torn the country apart.
So while the New York Post cleverly dubbed CNN “THE MOST BUSTED NAME IN NEWS,” a play on the network’s slogan, the only thing distinguishing CNN from the rest of the establishment media is that it got caught red-handed peddling Red propaganda.
One might think this would be the end of CNN, but history tells a different story. WWII-era Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who’d been a journalist for a socialist newspaper, said that he learned that you could print one lie one week and a different one the next, and people wouldn’t remember because their memories were so short. (Of course, this perhaps tells us even more about socialists than it does about people in general.) And, of course, ex-president Bill Clinton, a notorious prevaricator, is still respected by more than 50 percent of our citizenry.
Thus, CNN’s and the rest of the establishment media’s fate may not rest on how much they can fool Americans, but on how much Americans are willing to be fooled.
Photo at top: AP Images
