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Trump Provokes CNN’s Self-Immolation, America Relieved By Roger Kimball

A couple of weeks ago in this space, I speculated that CNN, the Crackpot News Network, had reached the terminal stage of malevolent implausibility. “[I]t would be a good thing,” I wrote, “were CNN humiliated and sued out of existence. It performs no journalistic function, merely a destructively partisan one.”https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/05/trump-provokes-cnns-self-immolation-america-relieved/

As usual, I was too kind. CNN will not have to be sued out of existence, as Gawker Media, another disgusting purveyor of malicious gossip and fake news, was a year or so back. No, CNN seems to be performing a species of hara-kiri or seppuku in public.

Actually, CNN’s behavior is closer to the behaviour of the fanatic Naphta in his duel with the suave humanist Settembrini in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The two antagonists confront each other, pistols in hand. Settembrini calmly delopes; Naphta screams “You coward!” and shoots himself in the head. Everyone is happier.

Several people have suggested to me that the whole travel ban drama, in which Trump’s legally formed and disseminated executive order was stomped upon by a couple of grandstanding district judges run amok, was actually a cunning plan™ devised by Democrats. The idea, the hope, was that Trump would be so enraged by the obvious affront to his constitutional authority that he would overreact, do something legally culpable, and thus give his enemies grounds to call for his impeachment.

It didn’t work. Trump did issue his ill-formed “so-called judge” tweet, but beyond that, he sat back, fumed, and let his lawyers loose on the preposterous temporary restraining orders. Last week, the Supreme Court vindicated Trump (more or less), allowing a modified version of the travel bans to proceed (which they did as of last Thursday).

But two can play at the provoke-your-enemy-into-doing-something-stupid strategy. The media keep telling us how thin-skinned and volatile Donald Trump is. Just about everybody wishes he would Tweet less and enjoy it more. But when it comes to the art of provocation, Trump is a Supreme Galactic Master and the media are weenie pikers.

The media wheeled out Kathy Griffin, whose infamous photo shoot featured her holding a bloody severed head in Trump’s likeness. They deployed foul-mouth pundits who, like grubby, ill-bred school boys, emitted various scatalogical epithets about the president of the United States. They published fantastical stories about alleged connections between Trump surrogates and “the Russians,” but then walk them back or, in the case of the latest libel, publically disown the story, scrub it from the Internet, and fire the three senior employees responsible for its writing and publication.

When the avid Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson goes on a hunting expedition against Republican congressmen, shooting several, the media blame Republicans for creating a “climate of hate.” (One Democratic official was recorded saying he hoped Rep. Steve Scalise [R-La.], the most seriously injured, would die.)

Gangsta News Network Trump-deranged CNN extorts online satirist for making fun of it. Matthew Vadum

CNN’s case of Trump Derangement Syndrome has become so monstrously acute the network is now hunting down and extorting those who mock it online.

And if there is one thing mendacious, entitled, left-wing journalists hate, it’s being ridiculed in public. So the network, whose anti-Trump stories outdo even the Soviet echo chamber that is MSNBC, threatened to “dox” the mocker. “Doxing” is putting a person’s private information such as a home address, telephone number, or Social Security Number online for the world to see.

This, the latest in a long line of CNN intrigues, began Sunday when President Trump tweeted a modified 10-year-old video of his guest-star appearance at a wrestling match. What apparently earned CNN’s ire was the fact that its corporate logo was superimposed over the face of the person Trump is shown pretending to rough up. After Trump finishes with “CNN,” a graphic for a made-up “FNN: Fraud News Network” is conspicuously displayed.

CNN’s KFile investigative squad, run by world-class sleaze and character assassin Andrew Kaczynski, then claimed to have found the Reddit user who created the now-wildly popular animated meme – in Internet parlance, a GIF file – showing a hands-on Trump making America great again by putting the hurt on the Atlanta-based fake news network whose singular mission at the moment is to take down the nation’s democratically-elected 45th president.

CNN’s Kaczynski declared the network would not reveal the true identity of Reddit user, HannAssholeSolo, who generated the meme, “because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.”

But then Kaczynski offered what certainly seems like prima facie evidence of extortion against the Reddit user: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

Later the network added this lame explanation to the public record:

CNN decided not to publish the name of the Reddit user out of concern for his safety. Any assertion that the network blackmailed or coerced him is false. The user, who is an adult male, not a 15-year-old boy, apologized and deleted his account before ever speaking with our reporter. CNN never made any deal, of any kind, with the user. In fact, CNN included its decision to withhold the user’s identity in an effort to be completely transparent that there was no deal.

Sometimes CNN and Kaczynski don’t know when to stop digging.

“It’s unclear what the person did that would necessitate an apology or why the GIF constitutes ‘ugly behavior, but in any case CNN threatened “to publish his identity should any of that change,” Mark Tapson writes. “Now #CNNBlackmail is a top trend on Twitter.”

CNN’s actions are clearly grossly unethical and, as suggested above, are likely criminal.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote that the media outlet’s behavior was “[t]roubling.”

“I assume CNN’s lawyers are examining GA § 16-8-16 Theft by extortion. If CNN constructively obtained the gif-maker’s IP… it’s a GA crime if they threatened to ‘Disseminate any information tending to subject any person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule….’” he wrote.

Winning all round: The dirtier the fight gets between Trump and the media the more they BOTH seem to gain but it’s his game, his rules and in the long-run the press will lose: Piers Morgan

‘Good publicity is preferable to bad,’ said Donald Trump in his best-selling book Art of the Deal, ‘but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.’

Never has this mantra seemed more appropriate than today.

Trump’s savagely personal assault on the US mainstream media – aka the MSM – in the past week has ignited a firestorm of controversy and bad publicity.

It began when he tweeted that MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ host Mika Brzezinski was ‘low IQ crazy Mika’ and claimed she had been ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’ during a New Year’s Eve visit to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.

This was obviously a grotesquely offensive thing for the President of the United States to publicly state about anyone.

To say it about a woman, any woman, also smacks of crass misogyny.

But before we martyr poor Ms Brzezinksi too fervently, it is worth pointing out that she herself is no innocent little lamb in the personal abuse stakes.

The reason for Trump’s tirade was that she spent the previous day’s ‘Morning Joe’ repeatedly mocking him for his ‘teensy hands’.

In fact, she devotes a lot of her time to ridiculing Trump for the way he looks and behaves.

And let’s not be naïve here, she does it knowing full well that Trump will eventually retaliate, and when he does, she and her show will dominate the news for a few days and get a substantial ratings boost.

Those increased ratings lead to increased profits.

Controversy, in short, sells.

Trump responded to the inevitable furore with another stinging tweet about Brzezinksi and her co-host and fiance, branding them ‘Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika’.

Now, I happen to think Scarborough and Brzezinksi are two very smart and able broadcasters. But since their old friend Trump won the White House they’ve gone rogue on him. Why? Partly because I believe they genuinely have issues with the way he has started his presidency. But also, I suspect, because MSNBC is making a fortune from whacking the president.

Indeed, at the weekend Joe Scarborough was able to boast on Twitter about record ratings for their show.

Trump then turned his Twitter turret sights onto his favored enemy: my old employers, CNN.

They gifted him a massive PR goal last week by firing three top journalists for an entirely false story linking a Trump associate to Russian financial skullduggery.

And, as I predicted, the president has embarked on immediate ball-spiking frenzy.

‘I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism,’ Trump tweeted. ‘It’s about time!’

CNN’s Fake News Machine Daniel Greenfield

In April, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post’s words, at “the forefront of the New York Times’s reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.” It was “an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”. It didn’t take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.

Lichtblau has resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.

“Eric will guide our coverage and thinking,” Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted. “And when he’s onto a investigation, he’ll still be reporting and writing too.”

Not for long. And Haris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.

CNN Investigates had been announced after President Trump’s inauguration. Its hit pieces had followed the same pattern as the Scaramucci attack that would be its undoing. Go after a personality tipped for a job with the new administration. CNN Investigates had previously targeted Monica Crowley and Sheriff Clarke with plagiarism accusations. But this time around, CNN’s anti-Trump unit had made a big mistake.

Unlike K-File’s petty harassment of Trump associates, the Scaramucci hit piece came from the heavier hitters poached by CNN from mainstream media papers who were supposed to bring down Trump.

The men behind the disaster were no lightweights. Thomas Frank had been nominated for a Pulitzer. Eric Lichtblau had shared a Pulitzer for bashing the Bush administration over, of all things, surveillance. Their names were all over CNN hit pieces tying to tie Trump to an impeachable Russian scandal.

That was what they had been hired for.

CNN claimed that Lichtblau had been “reporting on Comey for more than a decade.” And Frank was busy rolling out fresh grist for the Trump-Russia mill. One Frank article on CNN breathlessly claimed, “One week, three more Trump-Russia connections.” CNN was riding the impeachment train to Moscow.

And yet Lichtblau’s tenure at CNN quickly became troubled. An early June piece denied that Comey had told President Trump that he was not under investigation.

“Comey expected to refute Trump,” was the headline. The headline didn’t hold up. An awkward correction was appended conceding that its premise had been discredited by Comey’s testimony.

The sources were, as usual, anonymous. The Fake News story was full of “a source tells CNN” and “another source said” attributions. Seventeen of them.

The hodgepodge of anonymous sources read like a bizarre fairy tale or mystery novel.

Was “the source said” the first anonymous source? Was “a source adds” the second anonymous source? Or a third anonymous source? Was “a source” the same as “one source” who claimed to be “familiar” with Comey’s thinking?

“This source” seemed to be different than “one source.” But what about “another source”? And the “sources”?

THE MEDIA WILL DO ANYTHING TO BASH TRUMP- AND NOW THEY’RE HURTING: MICHAEL GOODWIN

It was many years ago, but the memory lingers of the first time I was embarrassed to be a journalist. It was a steamy summer afternoon and reporters and photographers were shoehorned into a small Manhattan apartment for a civic group’s announcement.

As we waited, a photographer wearing a “Press” card in his battered fedora picked up a bud vase from a table, pulled out the rose and drank the water in one gulp.

The hostess was horrified and shrieked, “What are you doing?” He looked at her as if she were nuts and said simply, “It’s hot in here and I’m thirsty.”

I laugh now at the outlandishness of the photographer’s behavior, but at the time I cringed and wondered: Do I really want to be a journalist and end up like that?

America should be so lucky now. Bad manners are the least of it.

In the sixth month of Donald Trump’s presidency, we are witnessing an unprecedented meltdown of much of the media. Standards have been tossed overboard in a frenzy to bring down the president.

Trump, like all presidents, deserves coverage that is skeptical and tough, but also fair. That’s not what he’s getting.

What started as bias against him has become a cancer that is consuming the best and brightest. In rough biblical justice, media attempts to destroy the president are boomeranging and leaving their reputations in tatters.

He accuses them of publishing fake news, and they respond with such blind hatred that they end up publishing fake news. That’ll show him.

CNN is suffering an especially bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, even trying to make a virtue of its hostility to the president. In doing so, executives conveniently confuse animus with professional skepticism, and cite growing audiences as proof of their good judgment.

The bottom line matters, and there is certainly an audience for hating Trump all the time. But facts and fairness separate major news organizations from any other business looking to make a buck, and a commitment to them creates credibility and public trust.

That’s how CNN sold itself for years — boring but trustworthy. Now it’s boring and untrustworthy.

For all its bravado, the network might be having doubts about its course. Its apology for and retraction of a story connecting a Trump associate to a Russia investment fund, and the resignation of three journalists involved, suggest the network fears it has lost control of its own agenda. It also issued a special edict barring all Russia coverage without approval from top bosses.
SEE ALSO
CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story
CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story

That’s hardly a solution to a problem that starts at the top. The secret recording of a CNN producer by James O’Keefe’s

CNN Producer Admits Witch Hunt Against Trump Project Veritas reveals what the network’s Russia obsession is really about. Matthew Vadum

CNN’s relentlessly biased coverage of the Left’s baseless Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory against President Trump is “mostly bullshit,” a senior CNN producer was caught revealing on sensational hidden camera video footage.

President Trump promptly agreed with the producer on Twitter.

“So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC?” the president tweeted at 8:47 a.m. yesterday. “What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!”

CNN producer John Bonifield made the brazen admission of the network’s absence of journalistic bona fides to an undercover reporter from ACORN-slayer James O’Keefe’s investigative nonprofit, Project Veritas.

“He not only gave us a tour of CNN’s main newsroom, he gave us a window into the editorial bias and anti-Trump agenda of the organization,” O’Keefe says as he narrates the video. Project Veritas is touting the video as the first installment in a multi-part investigation the group calls “American Pravda.”

O’Keefe continues:

Our goal is to expose the real motivations behind the decision-making process at our dominant media corporations. Fake News. One story has monopolized President Trump’s time in office like no other, especially on CNN: Russia. In fact, since the Inauguration, CNN has mentioned Russia on their air nearly 16,000 times. So we sent our undercover reporters inside CNN to understand why and to determine if CNN even believes if the story is even real.

In the video published online, Bonifield acknowledges that the news network’s nonstop Russian scandal-mongering about Trump has little evidentiary basis.

“Could be bullshit,” said the supervising producer for CNN Health. “I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now.”

Bonifield continued:

Like, we don’t have any giant proof. Then they say, well there’s still an investigation going on. And you’re like, yeah, I don’t know. If they were finding something we would know about it. The way these leaks happen, they would leak it. They’d leak. If it was something really good, it would leak…. The leaks keep leaking and there’s so many great leaks, and it’s amazing. I just refuse to believe that if they had something really good like that that wouldn’t leak because we’ve been getting all these other leaks. So, I just feel like they don’t really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun. You have no real proof.

“I haven’t seen any good evidence to show the president committed a crime,” Bonifield also says.

“Even if Russia was trying to swing an election, we try to swing their elections, our CIA is doing shit all the time, we’re out there trying to manipulate governments,” he explains.

But CNN is doggedly pursuing the fanciful Russia story because those at the top of the network are focused on “ratings,” he says.

“Our ratings are incredible right now,” Bonifield says.

He’s not lying.

“CNN had its most-watched first quarter in 14 years, both in the key demo and in total viewers,” Variety reports, adding that cable competitors Fox News and MSNBC also experienced “double-digit ratings growth across the board for the second quarter of 2017, according to Nielsen data.”

According to Bonifield, the Russia story regularly crowds out other newsworthy stories where he works. For example, CNN’s coverage of Trump’s disavowal of the Paris Climate Accord barely lasted two days, after which the network eagerly shifted coverage back to the Russia nonsense.

How CNN’s Fake News Machine Ran Conspiracy theories, anonymous sources and big lies. June 28, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

In April, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post’s words, at “the forefront of the New York Times’s reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.” It was “an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”. It didn’t take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.

Lichtblau has resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.

“Eric will guide our coverage and thinking,” Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted. “And when he’s onto a investigation, he’ll still be reporting and writing too.”

Not for long. And Haris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.

CNN Investigates had been announced after President Trump’s inauguration. Its hit pieces had followed the same pattern as the Scaramucci attack that would be its undoing. Go after a personality tipped for a job with the new administration. CNN Investigates had previously targeted Monica Crowley and Sheriff Clarke with plagiarism accusations. But this time around, CNN’s anti-Trump unit had made a big mistake.

Unlike K-File’s petty harassment of Trump associates, the Scaramucci hit piece came from the heavier hitters poached by CNN from mainstream media papers who were supposed to bring down Trump.

The men behind the disaster were no lightweights. Thomas Frank had been nominated for a Pulitzer. Eric Lichtblau had shared a Pulitzer for bashing the Bush administration over, of all things, surveillance. Their names were all over CNN hit pieces tying to tie Trump to an impeachable Russian scandal.

That was what they had been hired for.

CNN claimed that Lichtblau had been “reporting on Comey for more than a decade.” And Frank was busy rolling out fresh grist for the Trump-Russia mill. One Frank article on CNN breathlessly claimed, “One week, three more Trump-Russia connections.” CNN was riding the impeachment train to Moscow.

And yet Lichtblau’s tenure at CNN quickly became troubled. An early June piece denied that Comey had told President Trump that he was not under investigation.

“Comey expected to refute Trump,” was the headline. The headline didn’t hold up. An awkward correction was appended conceding that its premise had been discredited by Comey’s testimony.

The sources were, as usual, anonymous. The Fake News story was full of “a source tells CNN” and “another source said” attributions. Seventeen of them.

The hodgepodge of anonymous sources read like a bizarre fairy tale or mystery novel.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

https://pjmedia.com/video/chris-matthews-trumps-comments-dont-make-any-coherence/

Chris Matthews attempted to make fun of President Trump’s nonsensical sentences, and instead said something a grammar teacher would give a demerit for. Matthews said, “His comments don’t make any coherence. They never make any coherence since he’s been President.” He could have said ‘his comments don’t make any sense,’ or ‘his comments aren’t coherent,’ but he didn’t. Oh the irony!

Trump’s media enemies know that bashing him makes them big money but CNN’s greediness and desperation to get him has cost them dear by Piers Morgan

CNN’s epic mistake probably stems from lethal combination of greed and laziness. The fact is Trump bashing has led to soaring ratings and readership – and thus soaring profits.

‘CNN, the most trusted name in news,’ bellows James Earl Jones morning, noon and night during the network’s 24/7 programming.

Well, not today it isn’t.

In arguably the most humiliating moment in its history, CNN just accepted resignations from three of its top journalists over a story they got horrendously wrong about President Trump and Russia.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time for CNN, or involved a worse kind of story.

Its war with Trump has escalated on an almost daily basis since he won the presidency.

He furiously brands CNN ‘Fake News’.

CNN, in turn, mocks and berates him at every turn and devotes huge resources toward trying to expose him.

The Scaramucci story was fake news. End.

And it was a story designed to cause great damage to Trump as he battles the potentially presidency-ending allegation that he colluded with Russians.

So how did this fiasco happen?

I fear the answer probably lies in that lethal combination of commercial greed and laziness.

CNN has enjoyed soaring ratings with its relentless, mostly negative focus on Trump’s presidency. That, in turn, has led to soaring profits.

The equation is simple: Trump-bashing = $$$.

They are not the only ones to do this; from MSNBC to Stephen Colbert, there are myriad media entities and shows currently cashing in big time by whacking Trump.

But with that success comes complacency.

CNN reported this story because it was desperate to report this story.

It was proof, finally, that a key Trump ally was up to his neck in financial filth with the Russians.

‘Follow the money’ was the Watergate journalists’ mantra, and it finally got them their man.

CNN’s own versions of Bernstein and Woodward clearly thought they were doing the same.

It’s a toxic, abusive relationship that’s got so vicious and vengeful it threatens to imperil the very cornerstone of democracy, freedom of speech.

Now, CNN’s high moral ground has crumbled beneath it in spectacular style.

Megyn Kelly’s NBC Show Continues to Tank By Peter Barry Chowka

The ratings for the latest episode of Megyn Kelly’s prime time Sunday night NBC program are in, and the bad news continues for the former Fox News channel star. Kelly’s June 25 show, her fourth outing on NBC, was the lowest rated one yet. The program came in third in the ratings, beaten by an ABC rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos and by CBS’s 60 Minutes. Kelly had only 400,000 viewers in the preferred demographic (viewers 18-49) while ABC and CBS each had 700,000. (On a typical night – June 22, 2016 – when she was on Fox News at 9 PM ET/PT, Kelly had almost that many viewers in the news demo – ages 25-54 – 384,000.) The total viewers of the three top broadcast channels during Kelly’s hour on June 25, 2017, 7-8 PM ET/PT, were CBS 7.2 million, ABC 3.9 million, and NBC 3.4 million.

Megyn Kelly

Kelly’s interview guest on Sunday June 25 was J. D. Vance, the author of the New York Times best-selling nonfiction book (47 weeks and counting on the list), Hillbilly Elegy. The book has put Vance, a native of Appalachia and a graduate of Yale Law School, on the trendy map for his ability to explain the beliefs of Americans in flyover country (a.k.a. Trump supporters) – who have been variously described elsewhere as “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” – to the cognoscenti on the coasts.

J. D. Vance on Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly

A number of mainstream media outlets increasingly appear to be lying in wait for Kelly to fail. An article in Breitbart links to a selection of them.

Kelly’s terrible ratings have led to many questions about her marketability and competence.

A network executive reportedly told CNN that NBC’s “fundamental mistake” was thinking Kelly was a “superstar” while Variety noted that Kelly’s star is ”dimmer than ever.” The Boston Globe eviscerated Kelly for being a “poseur” who lacks the “acumen” and “magnetism” to succeed at NBC News. Variety also pointed out that Kelly has pretty much alienated everyone in just three weeks at NBC.

NBC News has reportedly been “freaking out” over the“ratings disaster” that Kelly is turning out to be. Her ratings have been so terrible a New York radio host said NBC may be looking to unload Kelly and even ask Fox News to take her back.

But a high-ranking Fox News official told Breitbart News last week that there would be “no way” Kelly could crawl back to the network if such a scenario occurred and emphasized that Kelly simply would “not be welcomed back.”

“Come Hither:” Megyn Kelly Interviews Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia June 2017

Kelly’s first NBC show, on June 4 with Vladimir Putin, was her highest-rated program to date, but it lost one million viewers – over 15 percent of its total audience – in its second half hour after the Putin interview ended. That episode came in second to ABC’s broadcast of an NBA Finals basketball game.

Kelly’s third show, on June 18 with Alex Jones, was also a ratings disappointment and a full-blown public relations disaster. Any positive critiques of that episode, according to Newsmax, were accountable more to the efforts of the show’s editors (to make Alex Jones look bad and salvage the show’s reputation among liberal elitists) than to “Kelly’s performance in the interview.”