“CNN’s Russia story debacle came at the worst possible time for the network”, Paul Farhi reports for the Washington Post, describing the embarrassing collapse of CNN’s “exclusive” on a supposed Senate investigation of Wall Street bigshot/Trump insider Anthony Scaramucci’s supposed suspicious links with Russia: “When challenged on the particulars of the story, CNN acknowledged that it couldn’t stand by it. It retracted it and apologized to Scaramucci on Saturday. On Monday, [CNN investigations editor Lex] Haris and the editor and reporter of the piece, Eric Lichtblau and Thomas Frank, resigned from CNN.”
As Farhi tells us, this isn’t the first time, by a long shot, that CNN, in its zeal to get the “goods” on El Donaldo, has ended up shooting itself in the foot: “Among its other high-profile debacles over the past month, CNN fired comedian Kathy Griffin, who co-hosted its New Year’s Eve program, after she took part in a photo shoot in which she posed with a bloody facsimile of Trump’s severed head. It corrected a story that wrongly predicted what former FBI director James B. Comey would say about Trump in his congressional testimony. And it subsequently canceled a new series, “Believer,” and fired host Reza Aslan after he described Trump in vulgar terms on Twitter.”
Not pretty, huh? Lucky the Post never gets it wrong, eh? Oh, wait. Perennial scold Glenn Greenwald catches the Post with its pants down, suggesting that the Post, seeking to head off a Trump-manufactured US/Russia alliance, has run up a streak of extravagant blunders re the latter-day Evil Empire: 1) Russia’s non-hack of the U.S. electric grid; 2) the Russian “disinformation campaign” that did not plant stories viewed 213 million times; and 3) the “CrowdStrike” report on Russian hacking that proved to be, well, totally unreliable.
But, hey. The Post can’t be expected to report everything.
Afterwords
I am quite willing to believe that both Donald Trump and his campaign have had separate, unsavory relations with Putin’s Russia. I certainly dislike Trump’s obvious admiration for Vladimir Putin, though I also dislike Hillary Clinton’s fixed conviction that Putin needs to be “taught a lesson”. It ought to be possible to forge a Russian policy based neither on boodle nor moral vanity.
