NPR media reporter David Folkenflik touted the news on Monday that CNN announced a “major new initiative in investigative reporting” without really noticing the irony: Why are all the liberal outlets beefing up their I-teams now that Barack Obama has left the White House?
The laugh line comes in the middle, when Andrew Morse, the executive vice president of editorial for CNN/U.S insists: "This effort is not a response to the administration in Washington, but it's certainly well-timed," Morse said. "It's very important for us to do good, solid independent work at a time like this."
Adding to the liberal tinge of this must-expose-Trump press release is who exactly is advising CNN: two hardened media leftists, Nixon-ruining Watergate hero Carl Bernstein and James Steele, half of an “investigative” duo that socialists adore, currently writing for the lefty rag Vanity Fair. Both of these guys milked their liberal reputations for stints at Time magazine. For more on Steele and his partner Donald Barlett and how their reporting matches DNC talking points, see Brent Baker’s summary of this dyspeptic duo. On CNN shows, Bernstein has called Trump a "neo-fascist sociopath."
So naturally, the liberal NPR reporter calls them “legendary,” and never calls the conservatives who might point and laugh at the obvious bias of the whole enterprise:
The legendary investigative reporters Carl Bernstein and James Steele, both Pulitzer Prize winners, will serve as contributing editors to advise the team on their work and executives on hiring.
"A lot of news divisions, newspapers and online projects say they want to do this," said Steele, who remains a contributing writer at Vanity Fair. "The message is really clear: This reporting is important to this institution. We really want to have an impact in this area."
"These news organizations that have huge budgets have not devoted historically the kinds of resources to investigative reporting that they are capable of," said Bernstein, who has been a contributor and commentator at CNN for the past three years. "With this, CNN is making a statement that it is capable of doing this kind of work and devoting the kind of resources to it that this deserves. Hopefully, other networks will do the same. It's good for journalism and it's good for the people of the country."
In other words, just as dissent is patriotic when the Republicans are in power, so is investigative reporting. CNN already had an investigative unit, but they have been adding liberals in the last year, especially the BuzzFeed alumni calling themselves “K-File.”
CNN’s investigators have already demonstrated an aggressive anti-Trump bias in the last few weeks, including the completely ironic exposure of plagiarized passages in a book by Monica Crowley, who lost her opportunity to work in the Trump White House. CNN has its own rampant plagiarist in-house, Fareed "Xerox" Zakaria. Did he lose his job at CNN when NewsBusters exposed him in 2012? No. He was suspended. For one week, one show.
Then there’s the CNN report that implied intelligence officials were very concerned that the Kremlin had embarrassing personal information on Donald Trump, which set up BuzzFeed to publish a completely unverified bucket of opposition research -- including the claim that Trump has Russian prostitutes urinate on him. Classy.
As Fox’s Howard Kurtz put it:
CNN made an editorial decision not to detail those claims because they are unverified. That’s an important distinction. But by using the fact that Trump was briefed about a two-page synopsis as a way to report the story, CNN put it in play and raised doubts whether, in some nefarious way, Trump had actually been “compromised.” I wouldn’t have made that decision, and other news outlets that now say they had the material didn’t either.
Unsurprisingly, a major player in this scandalous CNN attack on Trump was….one Carl Bernstein.
