Tag: cnn

CNN Calls for Limits on How Often Americans Can Travel Abroad: “Carbon Passports May be the Answer”

Ordinary folks like you and I are still doing too many things and going to too many places for the globalists’ liking, so CNN‘s Ross Bennett-Cook, a lecturer at the School of Architecture + Cities at the University of Westminster in London, has a solution: “carbon passports” that limit each person to no more than X-amount of travel in a given year.

According to Bennett-Cook, the end of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic” has brought with it a resurgence in public travel that he feels is generating too many so-called greenhouse gases, which he believes “are driving the climate crisis.”

Tourism, Bennett-Cook insists, “is part of the problem” because of all those jet fumes that allegedly “warm” the planet and create fictitious problems like “boiling oceans.” The only apparent solution, he says, is carbon passports that restrict travel for the world’s non-elite.

Taylor Swift and other celebrities will still be allowed to travel on their multiple private jets everywhere they go, but middle-class families will have to stay home for the rest of the year once they reach their carbon limit.

(Related: This is not the first time that CNN has called for implementing “carbon passports” to stop Americans from traveling.)

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CNN’s CEO Is Making Staff Churn Out Israel Propaganda

One of the noblest and most important things a western journalist can do these days is help expose the propagandistic manipulations of the mainstream western press institutions who have duped our civilization into consenting to a profoundly dysfunctional status quo which does not serve the interests of normal human beings. Unfortunately this rarely happens, because western journalists tend to view the mainstream press as allies and potential employers.

This happens to be one such rare occasion, and it happened in one of the last places you’d probably have guessed if you follow mass media propaganda with a critical eye. The Guardian has a great new article out titled “CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’” by a guy named Chris McGreal which cites multiple CNN staff members and internal documents to reveal the immense top-down pressure in the network to tilt coverage heavily in favor of Israel.

McGreal writes the following:

“CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.

“Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza.

“‘The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,’ said one CNN staffer. ‘Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.’”

McGreal’s sources say CNN’s wildly biased coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza is the direct result of edicts from the network’s new CEO Mark Thompson, who assumed his role two days after the October 7 attack. From 2012 to 2020 Thompson was the president and CEO of The New York Times, which is currently experiencing its own internal strife due to the pro-Israel bias of that outlet. 

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CNN RUNS GAZA COVERAGE PAST JERUSALEM TEAM OPERATING UNDER SHADOW OF IDF CENSOR

WHETHER REPORTING FROM the Middle East, the United States, or anywhere else across the globe, every CNN journalist covering Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the news organization’s bureau in Jerusalem prior to publication, under a long-standing CNN policy. While CNN says the policy is meant to ensure accuracy in reporting on a polarizing subject, it means that much of the network’s recent coverage of the war in Gaza — and its reverberations around the world — has been shaped by journalists who operate under the shadow of the country’s military censor. 

Like all foreign news organizations operating in Israel, CNN’s Jerusalem bureau is subject to the rules of the Israel Defense Forces’s censor, which dictates subjects that are off-limits for news organizations to cover, and censors articles it deems unfit or unsafe to print. As The Intercept reported last month, the military censor recently restricted eight subjects, including security cabinet meetings, information about hostages, and reporting on weapons captured by fighters in Gaza. In order to obtain a press pass in Israel, foreign reporters must sign a document agreeing to abide by the dictates of the censor.

CNN’s practice of routing coverage through the Jerusalem bureau does not mean that the military censor directly reviews every story. Still, the policy stands in contrast to other major news outlets, which in the past have run sensitive stories through desks outside of Israel to avoid the pressure of the censor. On top of the official and unspoken rules for reporting from Israel, CNN recently issued directives to its staff on specific language to use and avoid when reporting on violence in the Gaza Strip. The network also hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter at the onset of the war. 

“The policy of running stories about Israel or the Palestinians past the Jerusalem bureau has been in place for years,” a CNN spokesperson told The Intercept in an email. “It is simply down to the fact that there are many unique and complex local nuances that warrant extra scrutiny to make sure our reporting is as precise and accurate as possible.”

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CNN Caught Editing RFK Jr Speech To Mislead Viewers

When he appeared on CNN last week, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confronted with a video from one of his speeches — a video CNN clipped to convey a false impression that he had compared Covid restrictions to conditions in Nazi Germany. 

The dishonest ambush came on Dec. 15 as Kennedy was interviewed by former MSNBC anchor Kasie Hunt. Hunt showed a video of Kennedy speaking at a January 2022 rally in Washington, which includes a passage in which he said…

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.”  

Hunt had framed the clip to suggest Kennedy was specifically comparing Covid mandates to Hitler’s Germany.

As we’ll soon show, that was false.

In the passage from which the above excerpt was drawn, Kennedy was broadly addressing the rise of technology that threatens to enable a “turnkey totalitarianism” that would wildly surpass the capabilities of Hitler’s Nazi regime.   

To spice things up, Hunt next displayed a tweet from Kennedy’s own wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, which came a few days after the speech. 

At the time, Hines had been repeatedly nagged by NBC News reporter Ben Collins and others on social media asking if she stood by Kennedy’s remarks. She eventually folded and posted a tweet in which she threw her own husband under the bus, embracing the ridiculous, politically-correct notion — propped up by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League — that nobody’s allowed to compare anything to the Holocaust.

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Recalling CNN’s Fraudulent “Interview” With A Seven Year-Old Syrian Girl

There’s a thread going around on Twitter by Columbia University’s Sophie Fullerton advancing the claim that I have promoted crazy conspiracy theories about child “crisis actors” in Syrian war atrocities. Fullerton has me blocked on Twitter so I can’t respond to her there, but in her thread she brings up one of the most egregious instances I’ve ever seen of US war propaganda in the mass media, so it’s worth taking some time to unpack her claims here as a public service.

Fullerton has written for The Washington Post slamming social media users who travel to Syria and dispute the official mainstream narrative about what’s been happening in that country, and has served as an expert analyst in a Daily Beast hit piece on the progressive Gravel Institute for their scrutiny of US warmongering. So it’s fair to call her a spinmeister on the side of the US empire, and it’s probably fair to predict that her young career will bring her tremendous success and mainstream elevation as a result of this.

“It takes a special kind of evil to see what happened yesterday in Dnipro and immediately start doing PR for the perpetrator,” Fullerton tweets, with a screenshot of me saying it’s deceitful for people to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war. “It should come at no surprise that this account built a following out of claiming Syrian children impacted by Assad/Russia atrocities were crisis actors,” she adds.

Fullerton’s thread has gained a lot of traction because it has been amplified by Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the imperialist think tank Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) with a large following. CEPA’s donor list includes the US State Department, the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, and the weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and General Atomics.

Fullerton uses the phrase “crisis actors” to evoke the image most people have of that term and what it means: conspiracy theories about actors pretending to have been wounded or otherwise involved in a false flag mass shooting or bombing incident, particularly Alex Jones’s infamous claims about Sandy Hook victims. Google defines “crisis actor” as “a person who takes part in a supposed conspiracy to manipulate public opinion by pretending to be a victim of an event such as a bombing, mass shooting, or natural disaster.” Imperial spinmeisters have a history of using the phrase “crisis actors” to smear skeptics of dubious claims by the US empire about what’s been happening in Syria as crazy conspiracy theorists who are the same as Sandy Hook deniers.

But for her evidence of my “crisis actors” conspiracy theorizing, Fullerton cites something very different from any such claim. She cites an article I wrote in 2018 titled “That Time CNN Staged A Fake Interview With A Syrian Child For War Propaganda“, and revealingly she includes only a screenshot of the top of the article rather than providing a link. She did this because the arguments made in the article are unassailable, and she doesn’t want people to see them.

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CNN Recruits Washington’s Worst Warmonger The Instant He Leaves Congress

CNN has shattered the speed of light in its haste to recruit former representative Adam Kinzinger to its punditry lineup the millisecond he left congress.

Kinzinger, who prior to being redistricted out of his House seat received handsome campaign contributions from arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, was arguably the most egregious warmonger on Capitol Hill.

Nobody in congress lobbied as aggressively to start World War Three as Kinzinger did last year; he tried to advance a bill authorizing hot war against Russia if Moscow crossed specified red lines in Ukraine but couldn’t get cosponsors because even his fellow congressional hawks thought it was too insane. He was the loudest voice in the US government publicly advocating a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, an idea that was slammed by the mass media as it would necessarily have entailed the US military shooting down Russian war planes and aggressively tempted nuclear war.

Kinzinger was such a demented omnicidal maniac in 2022 that while still in office he became an official member of the empire-backed online troll farm known as “NAFO”, which was founded by an actual neo-Nazi whom Kinzinger openly supported both before and after revelations emerged of the founder’s expressions of hatred for Jews and fondness for Hitler. While still a sitting congressman he was flagging trolls with hashtags inviting them to swarm the social media comments of critics of US foreign policy who opposed his psychopathic warmongering.

Before the war in Ukraine Kinzinger was calling for the re-invasion of Afghanistan immediately following the US troop withdrawal and raging about public opposition to “endless war.” Before that he was cheerleading Trump’s assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, calling for US interventionism in Venezuela, defending the US-backed war on Yemen, calling for the invasion of Syria, and just generally pushing for more war and militarism at every opportunity. Before that, he was helping the empire kill Iraqis as a member of the US Air Force.

Kinzinger is such an obnoxious warmonger online that I myself have called him “the single worst Twitter account that has ever existed,” long before his CNN gig was a twinkle in his eye.

So it’s no wonder a warmongering propaganda network snapped him up the instant he became available, ensuring that his warmongering receives as large a platform as possible. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp quipped regarding CNN’s hire, “All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig.”

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Crime Claims of CNN’s New Police Expert Don’t Hold Up to Facts

In its latest move to the right, CNN recently hired former NYPD flack John Miller as its “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.” As Josmar Trujillo observed more than five years ago (FAIR.org, 6/21/17), Miller “has spun the revolving door between law enforcement and media like perhaps no one else,” moving back and forth between jobs at the NYPD, FBI, ABC and CBS.

Just last year, while working for the NYPD, Miller falsely testified that there was “no evidence” the department had spied on Muslims in mosques—when, in fact, AP had won a Pulitzer in 2012 for uncovering how after 9/11 the NYPD “systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods, listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents” (Popular Information, 9/7/22). Shahana Hanif, the Muslim city council member who called out Miller’s lies, told Popular Information:

John Miller had the audacity to lie under oath about the nature of this program to my face…. Someone like John Miller should not be in public service nor should they be given a platform on a mainstream cable news network.

Predictably, within days of joining CNN, Miller offered up a healthy dose of dishonest copaganda to the network’s audience.

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CNN analyst blames Trump for aftermath of Will Smith-Chris Rock Oscars incident

A CNN analyst appeared to blame the chaotic scene that occurred after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock during the 94th Annual Academy Awards on none other than longtime CNN nemesis former President Trump. 

During the Oscars on Sunday night, Smith charged the stage and smacked Rock in the face after the comedian make a joke about the “King Richard” actor’s wife. The incident stunned the crowd, but the show went on and Smith eventually won the coveted Best Actor award. 

CNN’s Asha Rangappa decided the Dolby Theater crowd stuck around because of Trump.  

“So did like anyone walk out after that happened??? Or are we getting an independent psychological case study on how Trump got normalized?” Rangappa asked on Twitter.

Rangappa was swiftly mocked for blaming Trump for the incident.

CNN famously drifted away from its once-nonpartisan style to an anti-Trump, liberal network under former boss Jeff Zucker, who was forced to step down earlier this year. Incoming boss Chis Licht is expected to attempt to steer the network back toward the just-the-facts approach to news that founder Ted Turner intended. 

Rangappa, who is one of the network’s more outspoken liberals on social media, was mocked last year for comparing a Southwest pilot who objected to President Biden to an ISIS sympathizer. A pilot on a Southwest flight from Houston to Albuquerque signed off his announcement for passengers by saying, “Let’s Go Brandon,” according to an Associated Press journalist who was reportedly on the flight.

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CNN Masturbator Toobin Says Kiddie Porn Laws Are TOO STRICT

Amid the questioning of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dubious record of light sentencing for child porn offenders, CNN brought on an ‘expert’ in Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin who declared that he thinks the laws are too harsh.

Toobin, who was infamously temporarily suspended for masturbating on a Zoom call, appeared on the network Tuesday to discuss the matter, and concluded that the line of questioning on pedophilia by Republicans is part of an appeal to right wing conspiracy theorists.

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