Chris Cillizza, an advocacy journalist and politics editor for CNN, is having a very difficult week.
Not only did Cillizza struggle to respond to questions asked during an online Reddit AMA [Ask Me Anything] session on Tuesday, July 18, but on the following day, he jumped into a thunderstorm of “Fake News” when he claimed that no media outlet reported anything about a "secret meeting” at which President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, engaged in a “sinister” dialogue.
According to an article written by John Nolte of the Daily Wire website:
As we all now know, on Tuesday night, straight through to Wednesday, the American media went on another one of their Fake News Witch Hunts against Donald Trump.
Desperate to keep their flailing Russian conspiracy theory afloat, the media took a usual G20 dinner conversation, one that took place literally in front of the whole world, a dinner the media all knew about, and turned it into a series of frenzied fake headlines.
“This is a classic bit of Trump misdirection,” Cillizza stated in his effort to keep the story alive. “No media outlet reported anything about a ‘secret dinner.’ No one is making the dinner look ‘sinister.’ And no one is suggesting that the media was unaware that the dinner was taking place.
It didn’t take long for Trump to respond in a post on Twitter:
Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!
The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!
“Because the media did not already look dishonest and foolish enough at this point,” Nolte stated, “enter dumb-dumb Cillizza to go for the extra point” by stating on Twitter: “Again, NO ONE is saying the meeting was private or secret. NO ONE.”
Nolte stated: “I'll let Matt Boyle from Breitbart News take it from here:”
On the same day that Cillizza published his fake news -- Wednesday, July 19 -- two different CNN anchors contradicted his assertion that nobody said the meeting was “secret” live on air on CNN.
Brooke Baldwin, a CNN anchor, twice referred to the meeting as a “secret sitdown” between Trump and Putin -- and even at one point asked: “Why didn’t we know about this?”
According to the network’s transcript, CNN's At This Hour host Kate Bolduan “on Wednesday called it a ‘secret and second sitdown’ between the president and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Why wasn’t the meeting revealed?”
Nolte then went on to stress an important point: “According to CNN's own transcript, Bolduan made the above statement at 11:49 a.m. ET. According to CNN's own timestamp, Cillizza published/updated his piece a full three hours later.”
“Because Cillizza and CNN have no shame or ethics, Cillizza has so far refused to either correct or retract (which is what he should do) a blatant lie,” the Daily Wire reporter added.
He then stated: “So what we have here is The Fakest Name in Fake News attempting to have it both ways -- serially lying about Trump having a ‘secret’ meeting and then attacking Trump with the audacious lie that no one is using the word ‘secret,’ even as the word ‘secret’ is all over CNN's airwaves and website!”
“Is it any wonder, then, that a failed flunky from The View like Nicolle Wallace is pulling in more viewers at MSNBC than the entire CNN prime-time line-up?”
Of course, Nolte had more to say about Cillizza’s question-and-answer session on Tuesday.
“CNN star Chris Cillizza poked his head out of the womb Tuesday -- you know, the MSM womb where everyone is safe from the real world consequences of failure and lying, the womb where everyone fails upwards, where no matter how dishonest and dead-wrong you are, you are always loved and perfect and precious?”
Nolte continued:
And things went hilariously, gloriously, righteously awry. Cillizza discovered that out here in the real America, thanks to his shallow ethics, shoddy work and high opinion of his own adorableness, he is nothing less than a universal laughingstock.
Cillizza is shallow and stupid and dishonest, and like most of the punditocracy, almost always wrong.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “Cillizza's Reddit AMA offers a ray of hope in this divided country of ours. At the very least, we can all come together and agree that everybody hates Chris.”
Obviously, Nolte has no problem when it comes to expressing his feelings, and Cillizza should take a course on journalists’ need to check facts before posting “Fake News.”
