Saturday, December 9, 2017

Dear CNN, Your Bananas Are Showing

In October CNN released an ad intended to battle claims the cable news outfit was fake news and to stem the tide of “CNN Is Fake News” memes.
The ad copy should read:
“This is a banana.  CNN might try to tell you that it’s an apple.  They might scream apple, apple, apple over and over and over again.  They might put APPLE in all caps.  You might even start to believe that this is an apple.  But it’s not.  This is a banana.”
FACTS FIRST
Yesterday, CNN advanced a story claiming to show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia; a talking point they have hung onto for dear life since last year.
Reporters Manu Raj and Jeremy Herb insinuated that Donald Trump, Jr. was given advanced notice on September 4, 2016 about hacked documents before they were made public by WikiLeaks.  Raj and Herb claimed to have spoken to two sources who “confirmed the date”.
In a nutshell, one of the sources was a mysterious “Mike Eckerson” who no one has been able to identify or confirm as a real person.  CBS followed up on the story and made the very same claim.  The problem for CNN is the emails at the heart of this fake news story were discussed in the House Intelligence Committee two days earlier.  The Washington Post, of all places, called out the piece as completely false.  The folks at the Post had actually seen the email for themselves and verified it was, in fact, sent on September 14.  The files were already in the public domain and being widely discussed online.
The story turned out to be completely meaningless.
UPDATE:  Welcome Flopping Aces readers.  We wish to thank Brother Bob for linking to this post. 
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