Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders caustically criticized CNN and its peers in the partisan mainstream media Saturday for their most recent hash of “dangerous” fake news.
She delivered the rebuke while speaking with her newfound colleague Fox News host Jesse Watters about two fake news stories that were run just last week by the media.
“I wish I could say these moments are surprising,” she said. “While they are very sad and unfortunate, they’re not surprising at all. This is something that we have seen day in and day out, this type of information push.”
“There’s such a rush to find things to attack this president for, to blame this president for, that they don’t care if it’s right or not. If they can get one person to say it happened, they run with it.”
Listen:
Source: Fox News
She then aimed her ire specifically at CNN, which ran a since-debunked story last week accusing President Donald Trump of having jeopardized the position of a CIA spy situated in Russia and having effectively forced the federal agency to extract the spy for his or her safety.
The CIA refuted the false claim late Monday evening.
“The thing with CNN running out and pushing this narrative that the president put [CIA] operatives in danger, it’s just another example of the media trying to blame President Trump for the mistakes and the failures of the previous administration,” Sanders said.
Fact-check: TRUE.
The Washington Post’s lone conservative columnist confirmed late last week that “the decision to extract the source was first made before Trump took office, and the reason was mishandling of classified intelligence not by Trump but by the Obama administration.”
“What prompted that decision? Leaks to the media about the covert source’s reporting that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered and orchestrated Russia’s 2016 U.S. presidential election interference campaign,” WaPo’s Marc A. Thiessen explained.
The media — including CNN — then took this information and spread it all across the world, thus endangering the life of the unnamed spy.
In its own report published last week, The New York Times added that, according to current intelligence officials, “media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction.”
So it was the actions of both Obama’s scandal-plagued intelligence officials AND the partisan media that led to the spy’s extraction.
Yet as of Sunday, CNN’s original report remained online and without any formal corrections:
Exclusive: The US extracted one of its top spies from Russia in 2017, worried about exposure and Trump’s handling of intelligence https://t.co/frFteqOq8O pic.twitter.com/aBSDtEbtTF
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) September 9, 2019
Not Exclusive:
CNN 100% wrong about thisThey try to blame #Trump for danger to this spy caused by Intel community leaks to the media during the Obama Admin & 2016 election
Literally their own fault https://t.co/DL8b2cCRzH
— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) September 10, 2019
“We have seen it time and time again,” Sanders continued Saturday on Fox. “And I don’t think that they are going to stop. I wish I could say at some point they will learn their lesson.”
Despite being exposed and admonished numerous times for sharing fake news, the media continue to share fake news without abandon.
“I think the only thing that may teach them that this just isn’t going to work is when they have to watch Donald Trump get re-elected again and win again in November of 2020, and they have another room full of crying individuals,” the former press secretary continued.
“I don’t know if that will help change, but maybe that will be the catalyst they need to start fact-checking some of this stuff because they run out just to try to hurt the president.”
“Room full of crying individuals” fact-check: TRUE.
‘People were throwing up. People were on the floor crying’ – Journalists Retell Their Election Night Horror Stories https://t.co/TJjZJduhxV pic.twitter.com/hEHFG8eHwk
— 1ClickBiz #Fearless45 #Trump2020 (@1ClickBiz) November 6, 2017
“Crying can be very therapeutic,” Watters quipped, before going on to list the numerous times that CNN in particular has shared fake news.
“You had the Scaramucci story which was fake; they had to fire people,” he said. “They had the Comey testimony, the Cohen testimony stories. Both were fake. That Don Jr. had advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks dumps story; that was fake.”
“Do you think that their sources that are calling them and saying ‘I got a big scoop, you guys should run with this’ — do you think the sources are just feeding them fake news or what?”
“My guess is there’s a mix,” Sanders replied. “Sometimes they think they have something, so they run with it. Other times maybe they’re getting fed that information, and they’re not doing their due diligence.”
“Some of these things, with a basic Google search you can find quickly are just not true, but they’re not putting that time in there because they’re so eager and so excited to tear this president down.”
They’re so seemingly “eager and so excited to tear this president down” that even the public at large see through them. A Rasmussen Reports poll published last month found that an overwhelming 78 percent majority of voters believe “that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda.”
“They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking an accurate record of what happened,” the pollster’s founder, Scott Rasmussen, said in an interview at the time with award-winning investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson.
“Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened. … If a reporter found out something that would hurt their favorite candidate, only 36% of voters think that they would report that.”
Watch:
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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