Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept is not someone I usually agree with (and that’s not just because he’s a lefty), but he gets full marks for his latest analysis of the unspeakable tripe that passes for news and analysis in the US Media.
The latest “story” or “bombshell” that CNN, MSNBC, CBS (all the usual suspects) came up with was the claim that proof had been uncovered that the Trump Team had colluded with “the Russians” prior to the election. Fevered and deranged “analysts” discussed the impending end of the Trump presidency, double shots of glee were passed around fuelling the already hysterical atmosphere.
Then, REALITY hit. You know, the real world. That one made up from stars, planets, atoms, people, not the fantasies of CNN hacks. The email that was supposedly going to rewrite history was from a concerned citizen to the Trump Team suggesting that they look at the documents recently released by Wikileaks. Greenwald says…
The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 — 10 days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online — and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.
But…
There was just one small problem with this story: It was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story — and then hyped it over and over and over — the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.
The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 — which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks — as everyone by then already knew — had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.
Read the whole thing here.
The story was passed around the networks (all colluding with one another) with claims that “multiple sources” had confirmed it, blah, blah. Of course, nobody checked the date on the original email. All the “corroborations” were nothing but lies invented to pretend to credibility.
What will drive into the thick heads of the TV apparatchiks of the Democrat Party that their credibility long ago went up in smoke? Who knows? People that deluded need treatment. Nurse Ratched, here’s a job for you.
Back in the days after the fall of communism in Russia, there was a line going around something like this…. “We knew that the Communists were lying about life in the Soviet Union, but we didn’t realize they were telling the truth about life in the West!”
Doesn’t sound so far off now, does it?
Rebel Yell