I wrote yesterday about CNN’s latest fiasco, the alleged email scoop that fizzled. Some have wondered why CNN, apparently “burned” by two sources that told CNN about the email but got the date critically wrong, hasn’t disclosed who they were. CNN says it hasn’t outed its sources because it thinks they made an innocent mistake:
CNN believes that its sources were just mistaken and did not want to deliberately mislead the network, @brianstelter reports. https://t.co/cOCw96gGMR pic.twitter.com/0G8AbMv30s
— Peter Sterne (@petersterne) December 9, 2017
Donald Trump, Jr., the victim of CNN’s fake news, took issue with that claim, sharply and effectively (via Twitchy:
Does anyone actually believe that CNN’s democratic sources, who had all the info, were not deliberately trying to hide facts that would turn a non-story into their exact BS narrative? No one is that naive!!! I’m sure they wouldn’t lie to cover their prominent source🙄 https://t.co/HEMuz9NRz3
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 9, 2017
I won’t hold my breath for an apology, or for you to call out your puppet masters on the left that fed you BS knowing you would gleefully run with it without ever checking the other side. Apparently it was just too good a scoop for you to actually do your job. You got played https://t.co/vnHQFd9i16
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 9, 2017
Strange that the #fakenews media never gets stories wrong in favor of Trump. It’s almost like they do it on purpose.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 9, 2017
I don’t think there is any mystery about why CNN doesn’t want to say who its sources were. As I wrote yesterday, they were almost certainly Democratic members or staff of the House Intelligence Committee, before which Donald Jr. testified on Wednesday. Those Congressmen or staffers fed the “scoop” to CNN, describing the email while getting the date wrong, even though the date was the only thing that made the communication arguably newsworthy. CNN rushed the story onto television and its web site without, as Donald Jr. points out, even bothering to contact him for his side of the story.
Identifying CNN’s sources would make it blindingly obvious to all that CNN was merely carrying water for the Democratic Party. CNN intends to continue doing exactly the same thing in the future–reporting uncorroborated “news stories” it is fed by Democrats on Capitol Hill–so by keeping its sources secret, the network is protecting itself, not the sources.
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