In 2016 CNN turned into an anti-Trump propaganda outfit.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
And a shocking new poll is brutal news for CNN.
As Black Eye Politics reports:
A bombshell Gallup/Knight Foundation poll found that a majority of Americans believe the corporate media intends to mislead them and so-called “journalists” do not have the readers’ best interests at heart.
The Associated Press reports:
Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed, the study found.
Similarly, 52% disagreed with a statement that disseminators of national news “care about the best interests of their readers, viewers and listeners,” the study found. It said 23% of respondents believed the journalists were acting in the public’s best interests.
The results of this poll were years in the making.
Back in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg — the then-media columnist at The New York Times — wrote that journalists covering Donald Trump faced a choice.
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional,” Rutenberg wrote in a piece about how journalists were tossing any pretense of objectivity.
So-called reporters adopted that posture beginning in the 2016 general election and continued throughout Trump’s presidency with outlets like the Washington Post, CNN and the Times openly declaring themselves part of the “resistance” to Trump by elevating activists to key reporter roles merely because of their willingness to oppose Trump and promote Democrats.
This trend in media really took off with the Russian collusion hoax where even New York Times editor Dean Baquet admitted everyone got taken for a ride on a nonsense conspiracy theory.
But even after Trump left office the press continues to lie to readers in order to help Democrats win elections.
Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman suffered a debilitating stroke days before the Democrat primary.
Fetterman and his campaign claimed it was no big deal and Fetterman would be back on the trail within weeks.
But Fetterman hid from the public and when he emerged in August it was clear he was a diminished man.
Fetterman could not speak in coherent and complete sentences.
NBC’s Dasha Burns performed one of the few acts of real journalism reporting that Fetterman could not understand basic conversation without the help of special transcription software.
“In small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation,” Burns reported.
This led to a media pile-on where former New York Times and current New York Magazine podcast host Kara Swisher falsely claimed there was nothing wrong with Fetterman.
Listen to the interview in which we did not edit the ums or ahs out as we typically do for everyone else. There were few slips — I had more — and at no moment did he seem distracted: https://t.co/ZdWDI6MifV
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) October 12, 2022
Other activists in the press ran wild with the claim Fetterman was disabled.
POLITICO reporter Steven Overly claimed Burns’ coverage amounted to bigotry against the disabled.
“It’s perfectly valid to question a candidate’s physical and mental fitness for national office. But some of the coverage of John Fetterman’s use of closed captioning technology in an interview with NBC News feels a helluva lot like ableism.
“Plenty of people with auditory issues (of which I am one) use closed captioning or other assistive tech at times to hear better. The implication that those people are less capable of understanding or tackling difficult things is patently untrue,” Overly added.
Fetterman ended up in the hospital barely one month after taking office after he developed headaches following the State of the Union.
Now that the election was in the rearview mirror the media could tell the truth.
When Fetterman checked into the hospital the Times reported that the stroke Fetterman suffered in May nearly killed him, that Fetterman heard conversation as sounding like the teacher from Charlie Brown cartoons, and that Fetterman rushed back to the campaign trail and may never recover 100 percent.
The Gallup poll showing most Americans believe the media lies on purpose can be seen as understandable in the context of how the corporate press covered Donald Trump and the John Fetterman health issues.