Tag: cnn

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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Did the Director of the CDC Admit She Gets Her Science From CNN?

At this point, taking the scientific establishment seriously has become a difficult thing to do. It’s clear that many of them have been co-opted by people more interested in pushing a political perspective through the veneer of science than actually following it. It only makes one want to further distance oneself from these institutions when calling them wrong about something very obvious is labeled as “misinformation” and used to censor and silence you.

But moreover, the people in charge of “the science” are increasingly proven to be corrupt and/or wildly incompetent. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky certainly isn’t doing herself any favors.

The CDC is known for its ability to flip-flop on things based on how much pushback it’s getting from leftists on Twitter. The unofficial CDC motto seems to be “politics first, science maybe.” The inconsistency shows that the CDC is being run by anything but actual science and that its marching orders are coming from outside, moreover, it further reinforced the idea that they were just making this stuff up as they went along.

Fast forward to last Sunday when Walensky was having a live-streamed sit-down where she effectively admitted that she was getting her data from the one place you should never get your data from. The long and short of it is that Walensky was creating CDC guidance after watching reports on CNN.

“When the CNN feed came that it was 95% effective, the vaccine, so many of us wanted it to be helpful, so many of us wanted to say, ‘Ok this is our ticket out.’”

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What Jeff Zucker’s resignation could mean for Chris Cuomo’s potential CNN payout

Chris Cuomo isn’t likely to get much more than half of the $18 million he’s seeking as a settlement in his feud with CNN now that Jeff Zucker has resigned, The Post has learned.

Zucker fell on his sword in an effort to keep a possible Cuomo lawsuit against CNN from seeing the light of day, sources told The Post. The ex-CNN chief was named multiple times in a draft of a suit, which hasn’t been filed, sources said.

Zucker’s resignation came as part of an agreement hammered out with AT&T chief John Stankey, sources say. Under the agreement, Zucker would leave CNN without a fight and Stankey would settle with Cuomo, the sources said.

That way, Cuomo’s potentially damaging additional accusations about Zucker would be kept from the public, these sources say.

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CNN Suggests That Doing Your Own Research Is “Idiotic” and Only They Can Tell You What’s Fact

When it comes to facts, CNN seems to believe that only it should be able to tell you what they are and what they aren’t. That desire goes so far as to suggest that going out and doing your own research is “idiotic.”

CNN host, Don Lemon, for instance, said that “we have to start doing things for the greater good of society and not for idiots who think they can do their own research,” adding that these same people think “they are above the law and they can break the rules.”

Firstly, the fact that he’s attacking people who do their own research as the same who think they’re “above the law and break the rules” is rich given the fact that he’s a Black Lives Matter supporter, and effectively applauded the destruction of cities and communities in the name of “justice.”

But most importantly is the suggestion by Lemon really exposes the mentality of CNN and even the mainstream media overall. It doesn’t like you going out to find the answers for yourself, let them tell you what is and isn’t reality. It’s for your own good, or as Lemon said, “the greater good.”

If you break down what he’s suggesting, he’s saying that they should be able to craft whatever narrative CNN pleases and have it be the way any situation is defined. This is effectively suggesting CNN should be able to lie to you and that lie is the truth.

It’s very Orwellian, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from CNN, which has effectively become a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.

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CNN Goes to Bizarre Lengths to Defend AOC’s Maskless Florida Romp

The left’s sweetheart and hard-left squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is like many leftists in that she’ll demand you act unselfishly and do something massively inconvenient to you because it’s for the greater good, then she’ll go and do the opposite of the thing she demanded of you because she thinks the rules don’t apply to her.

Case in point, AOC was seen partying it up in Miami, Florida with drag queens, and nary a mask was seen. An odd thing considering she’s one of those people who are for some of the toughest restrictions when it comes to COVID-19, including requiring vaccine papers to sit and eat at a restaurant in her district. As my colleague Nick Arama pointed out, this is the same AOC who wanted to vote by proxy on multiple occasions due to fears about the virus.

And like any typical leftist, AOC did what leftists do when called out in public for obvious hypocrisy and attempt to distract from it all by making it about something completely different. In this case, it was about how Republicans are sexually frustrated and that they’re taking their frustrations out on her.

It’s pretty by the book when it comes to AOC, but what about the media?

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