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05.04.2021 0

Fake News so bad even CNN calls them out!

This is a primary example of how a lie can go around the world three times before the truth even gets out of the gate.

By Rick Manning

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the nation’s most respected journalists, eviscerated the corporate media like the Washington Post and New York Times for being willing servants of anonymous intelligence or Justice Department officials who regularly provide them with false information to create a narrative that isn’t even close to true.

The latest example of egregious fake news involves the establishment media’s disastrous reporting of the FBI raid on Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s home

Greenwald wrote:

“Journalists with major outlets know they spread a false, retracted story about the FBI and Giuliani but refuse to remove it, because their real job is spreading disinformation.

“One of the primary plagues of corporate journalism, which I have documented more times than I can count, just reared its ugly head again to deceive millions of people with fake news. When one large news outlet publishes a false story based on whispers from anonymous security state agents with the CIA or FBI, other news outlets quickly purport that they have “independently confirmed” the false story, in order to bolster its credibility (oh, it must be true since other outlets have also confirmed it).

“This is an obvious scam — they have not ‘independently confirmed’ anything but rather merely acted as servants to the same lying security state agents who planted the original false story — but they do it over and over, creating the deceitful perception that a fake story has been “confirmed” by multiple outlets, thus bolstering its credibility in the public mind. It was the favored tactic for spreading debunked Russiagate frauds and is still used. One of the most vivid examples occurred in December, 2017, when CNN falsely reported what it hyped as “a major bombshell”: that Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC News’ Ken Dilanian and CBS News both claimed they had ‘independently confirmed’ this fairy tale. When it turned out that it was a complete lie, all based on a false date on an email to Trump Jr., these outlets embarrassingly corrected it hours later and then simply moved on as if it never happened, never explaining how multiple outlets could possibly have all ‘independently confirmed’ the same blatant falsehood.

“On Thursday night, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources (of course), claimed that the FBI gave a ‘defensive briefing’ to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine, that he was being targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign to hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy, yet he ignored the FBI’s warnings and went anyway. The Post also claimed that the right-wing news outlet OANN was similarly briefed. The claim about Giuliani not only predictably ricocheted all over social media and cable news — where, as usual, it was uncritically treated as Truth — but it was shortly thereafter ‘independently confirmed’ by both NBC News’ de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian along with The New York Times.

“This credibility carnage was so glaring that even CNN acknowledged that ‘the corrections are black eyes to the newsrooms which have aggressively reported on Giuliani’s contacts with Ukrainians in his attempts to dig up dirt on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.’ But there have been so many similar ‘black eyes’ like this one, indeed far worse ones, over the last five years, and they never change anything that causes these ‘black eyes’ because they want to do this: spreading disinformation is their function. Indeed, as I have asked almost every time these debacles happen: how is it possible that these same outlets keep ‘confirming’ one another’s false stories?”

This is a primary example of how a lie can go around the world three times before the truth even gets out of the gate. The Washington Post did not get multiple sources for the story and launched the lie.  Other outlets lied by claiming to have independently sourced the information and just re-ran the damaging lie against the former Mayor of New York City.  And now, these “journalists/copyboys/girls” won’t even retract their Tweets that hundreds of thousand people saw let alone their online reporting.  It is despicable and it is why no one trusts the media.

Rick Manning is President of Americans for Limited Government.

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