Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in
quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN,
with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators
and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it
was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news
outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to
millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it
happened.
The spectacle began on
Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent
12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report
that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the
Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC
emails before they were published on the internet. As
CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump
family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the
U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian
intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.
This entire
revelation was based on an email
which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its
possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” –
someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to
Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that
WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely
excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten 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.
It’s impossible to
convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed
it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of
excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly
believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump/Russia
collusion story:
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.
…
Why does this matter so much? For so many significant
reasons:
To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far and
wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives and
journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story
immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia
(through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, claiming
that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was re-tweeted thousands and
thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I
noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his
followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).
…
Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false
information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently
very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as
they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had
independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email, and published its own
breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered
collusion.
Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just
have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security
correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that
he independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct
knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to
flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA
tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes
in US journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact
with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct
knowledge” told him about all this.
