Newsbusters
September 2, 2018
Talk about a bad week!
One is simply gobsmacked at what has been going on over at CNN.
Back there in the mists of July, CNN’s Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein posted a piece on the latest-of-the-moment “news” about the now infamous “Trump Tower” meeting between various Trump supporters (Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort) and a Russian woman who was pitched as having campaign dirt on Hillary but in fact was there to, as it turned out, lobby against an American law on adoption the Russians hate. Among the controversies is whether Donald Trump knew of the meeting in advance. He says no.
Thus the “breaking news” aspect of this was that supposedly now-estranged Trump attorney Michael Cohen said he did. Something Cohen twice denied to an investigating congressional committee. The CNN piece contained this line:
“Contacted by CNN, one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment.”
The problem? BuzzFeed later headlined: “Lanny Davis says he was a source for CNN’s Trump Tower Story.”
In other words, with that one line CNN was telling its audience something that was, in fact, untrue. All hell quickly broke loose, and it wasn’t just coming from conservatives. There was the Left’s Glenn Greenwald headlining over his personal byline: “CNN, Credibly Accused of Lying to its Audience About a Key Claim in its Blockbuster Cohen Story, Refuses to Comment.”
Here were these lines in a story about CNN from the decidedly non-conservative Associated Press which ran, stunningly, in the New York Times. They read:
“The problem for CNN is that the July 27 story said ‘contacted by CNN, one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment.’
Yet, if Davis was actually an anonymous source for CNN, the story should not also say that Cohen’s lawyer declined to comment. You can’t have it both ways. That’s a big no-no in…