While legacy news outlets continue to pride themselves on their reputation as “the most trusted name in news,” they have often fallen short of the facts in the one department most pivotal to maintaining journalistic credibility: their fact-checkers.
“Facts are facts. They aren’t colored by emotion or bias. They are indisputable. There is no alternative to a fact,” wrote CNN’s Creative Marketing department. “That’s why, at CNN, we start with the facts first.”
CNN’s purported commitment to truth goes so far that prime time host Don Lemon said that U.S. internet users should only be able to express their opinion if it is “true,” because social media outlets should only print “opinions based in fact.”
The use of “fact-checking” to silence others long ago escaped CNN and metastasized throughout all media, traditional and online.
As Mark Hemingway recently wrote in a Reader’s Pass article for The Daily Wire, the great social media purge of all things conservative began with its decision to ban Infowars founder Alex Jones. Jones’ ouster “came shortly after a pressure campaign launched by CNN, a network that, ironically enough, had spent the last few years indulging in nonstop Trump-Russia reporting that wasn’t any less conspiratorial than many of Jones’ rantings,” Hemingway writes.
Hellbound and Down 