People who Googled “Donald Trump” this morning were treated to a “hot breaking scoop” courtesy of CNN and CBS News – that someone connected to Wikileaks attempted to email the Trump campaign in September ’16 with secret Wiki access to Hillary’s hacked communications.
Too bad…Every. Single. Thing in the report was completely fake news. Not according to Trump or his lawyers, but according to the entire news community!
Not only was the email never read, it was sent by a random Wikileaks fan AFTER the site released the documents. CBS News eagerly followed CNN off the cliff, with each organization meekly posting corrections hours after debunkers pointed out the absurdness of the report.
Read More: Wall Street Journal Calls For Robert Mueller To Step Down!
In fact, CNN has now actually proven that Donald Trump Jr. didn’t have any secret access or exchanges with Wikileaks. If he did, then nobody would have needed to send him codes!
More from Hot Air:
CNN becomes the third major media outlet in the past week to rush out a “scoop” before checking its information thoroughly. And as it was with ABC’s Brian Ross on Michael Flynn and Bloomberg on Deutsche Bank, the immediate impact of these false reports was to create suspicion about Trump and his motives without any evidence.
Perhaps media outlets should slow down and exercise the benefits of the “layers of fact-checkers and editors” about which we’ve been told ad infinitum. At the very least, let’s get an explanation as to how that failed in this case and Bloomberg’s (ABC has at least responded in regard to Ross’s false report).
In the meantime, their consumers can’t help but draw the conclusion from the past week that the national media seems extremely invested in anti-Trump memes, and don’t take a lot of care in presenting them. They may not like the term “fake news,” but they’re not doing a very good job convincing their consumers that it’s a myth.
Update: CBS News ran with their own story about the e-mail being dated September 4th in an article originally posted three minutes before the Post’s debunking. More than two hours later, they finally published the climbdown:
“Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the email was dated Sept. 4, 2016, instead of Sept. 14, 2016. The information was erroneously confirmed by a source, who subsequently sent the actual email to CBS News confirming the Sept. 14 date. The report has been updated to reflect the correct date, and the email is included in this update.”
Layers — I say, layers — of fact-checkers and editors went into this reporting.
At 3:45, nearly five hours after first posting the story (and featuring it on air), CNN finally corrected their “scoop”:
“Correction: This story has been corrected to say the date of the email was September 14, 2016, not September 4, 2016. The story also changed the headline and removed a tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who posted a message about WikiLeaks on September 4, 2016.”
In other words, there wasn’t a story here at all.
Actually there is a story. CNN really hates Donald Trump, and makes up stuff out of thin air to try to get him. It never works.
The end!
Join the conversation!
Please share your thoughts about this article below. We value your opinions, and would love to see you add to the discussion!