CNN has been in business long enough to know the true meaning of correction as a journalistic term. A correction is issued by a news outlet when it gets the facts in a story wrong in its initial report.
The paragraph the network appended last evening to a story it had previously published on its website is decidedly not a correction. It is, rather, an admission that CNN’s lust for the head of Donald Trump at any cost is based not on malfeasance but on hatred for the man and what he stands for.
Here’s the paragraph:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
CORRECTION AND UPDATE: This article was published before Comey released his prepared opening statement. The article and headline have been corrected to reflect that Comey does not directly dispute that Trump was told multiple times he was not under investigation in his prepared testimony released after this story was published.
The headline in question now reads: “Comey unlikely to judge on obstruction.” And what was the headline that it replaced? “Comey expected to refute Trump.”
The information in the original story was obtained from “unnamed sources.” The revised version is informed by “a source with knowledge of Comey’s testimony.”
The network giddily ran reports on the air featuring more public types who would help frame its narrative that Trump was going down and Comey’s testimony would be one of the torpedoes that sank him:
https://youtu.be/QDIbi1xyM9k
Even if we accept that CNN’s unnamed source has seen more of the testimony than Comey released yesterday in a prepared statement that was accessible to the public and available to anyone who can read, why should we believe anything a CNN source says? The initial information that the network culled from its “sources” was flat-out wrong. Hence, its backtracking — err… “correction” — on the story.
As we head to the witching hour of Comey’s vaunted appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the so-called mainstream media continue to promote the as-yet-unproven claim that Trump committed obstruction. The Washington Post not only repeats that claim this morning but drags out a former Watergate prosecutor ostensibly to make it seem more legit.
Up until Comey released his pre-testimony yesterday, the MSM were licking their chops, waiting for the axe to fall. Now that that statement is out, they are crossing their collective fingers and toes, hoping against hope that Trump will still be implicated in some crime.
Either way it’s pathetic.
