The Press Whiffs

For John, BLUF:  The Press, anxious to trip up President Trump, is stumbling over its own feet.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages and Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

Yes, it is a week old, but it is a typical Glenn Greenwald piece, in which he lifts up the table cloth and looks under the table to see what is hidden there.  A longish read, but valuable.

From The Intercept, Reporter Glenn Greenwald, 9 December 2017.

Here is the lede plus one:

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, and 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 Friday morning at 11 a.m. 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 Democratic National Committee 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.

Except the date on the smoking EMail was after the release of the data, not before.  Ooops.

Regards  —  Cliff