Again. On 22 Jun, CNN published, as part of its pseudo-journalism series on alleged ties between President Donald Trump and his associates and Russia, a claim that Anthony Scaramucci, an informal advisor to President Donald Trump, was tied to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign fund of the Russian government and led by Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, with whom readers might have a passing familiarity. The fund has been sanctioned by the US government (by the Obama administration; although it’s not under Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, then or now, another of CNN‘s false claims), hence the nefariousness of Scaramucci’s alleged association and the depth of CNN‘s smear against him.
After Breitbart, et al., exposed the misleading, anonymous, single-source rumor nature of CNN‘s hit piece, CNN further assaulted the public’s ability to know by deleting the piece from the Internet, rather than merely admitting it was false and retracting it. CNN with this move has chosen to censor the news in addition to making it up.
But that’s not all. CNNMoney Executive Editor Rich Barbieri sent a memo to CNN staff requiring that, henceforth,
No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason [VP of Premium Content Video Farkas] first.
There’s less to that, though, than meets the eye. The editors now demanding pre-publication review are the same editors who allowed the carefully unsubstantiated story to be published in the first place. These are the same editors who set that standard in the beginning. Too, given the volume of writing and the pace of publication, how carefully will that “review” be done on all those stories, even on a single subject? They’ll just get a lick and a CNN promise. And what about all the unsubstantiated rumors on other subjects these guys publish or repeat?
There’s more to it, too, than meets the eye. CNN is adding some seeming scapegoats to its “corrections:”
CNN announced late Monday that Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris have left the network.
Frank wrote the story. Lichtblau edited the piece, and Haris oversaw the CNN department, which is a new investigative unit.
More importantly, there’s still no requirement for corroboration by on-the-record sources of those “anonymous” sources’ claims.
Nothing is changing at CNN.