On his Monday evening Fox News show, Tucker Carlson reported that "top management at CNN directed its employees to undermine (Donna) Brazile’s credibility" after she revealed on Friday that Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign had "rigged" the Democratic Party nominating process in her favor.
One would think that CNN's left-leaning, Hillary-loving hosts and guests didn't need to be told, but it appears that management wanted to be sure that the attempt to discredit Brazile was carried out with sufficient persistence and enthusiasm.
Naturally, CNN is denying Carlson's assertion: "Any suggestion that CNN has ordered its employees to undermine Donna Brazile is false."
As seen in the video which follows, Carlson claimed to have "highly informed" sources:
Transcript (link to The Intercept added by me; HT Daily Caller; bolds are mine):
TUCKER CARLSON: People say the media are liberal, and obviously they are. But that's not the whole story.
More than anything, the national media are part of the establishment. They went to the same schools as the establishment. They sure the same values. They're basically the same people.
If you want evidence of this, look no further than the controversy over Donna Brazile's new book.
Brazil once ran the DNC. So when she says the Democratic Party worked hard to steal the election from Bernie Sanders, you can't exactly dismiss her as a partisan or a kook. And yet that's exactly what many in the establishment press have tried to do for several days.
According to highly informed sources we spoke to — highly informed — top management at CNN directed its employees to undermine Brazile’s credibility. Anchors and producers there were vocally offended, many of them, by Brazile's attacks on their friends, the Clintons. If you’ve been watching that channel, you may have noticed CNN’s anchors suggesting that Donna Brazile cannot be trusted, precisely because she took part in efforts to rig the primaries for Clinton.
Watch:
(cut to a CNN segment with Anderson Cooper)
ANDERSON COOPER: She's the one who, through somebody who doesn't work at CNN, got access to one townhall question, and sent an email, which we know from WikiLeaks, to someone in the Clinton campaign to give them a townhall question, which is completely unethical. She wasn't doing that for Bernie Sanders.
(cut to a CNN segment with Brooke Baldwin)
BROOKE BALDWIN: Do you take her at her word, Sam, given the fact that she lied about that CNN debate and giving those questions to Hillary Clinton ahead of time?
(back in studio)
CARLSON: It's unbelievable. In retrospect, they're so obviously talking points. Ugh - Glad to know that.
But CNN's not alone, by the way. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept wrote a great piece the other day in which he pointed out that journalists have repeatedly spread misleading stories designed to exonerate the behavior of Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
NBC News published a story claiming the Clinton-DNC agreement only applied to the general election. If they'd simply read the agreement, they would've seen that's false. It applied to both.
That claim was quickly though repeated by MSNBC, The Hill, and others. Again, it was false.
Establishment journalists also claimed that Sanders sign the very same agreement that Hillary Clinton did. That's false too.
The media loves a scandal, but in this case, they can't seem to downplay this one fast enough.
Greenwald cited two other viral falsehoods the press has promoted in connection with Brazile's charges:
Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.
No she didn't. Instead, "she was referencing a complicated process in the DNC charter that allowed for removal of a nominee who had become incapacitated."
Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored.
This one's ironic, give that Cooper, as seen above, is relying on WikiLeaks concerning the Brazile's debate question controversy.
But it's also false: "... evidence that the content of any of the WikiLeaks emails was altered is nonexistent, while there is overwhelming reason to believe none has been (beginning with the fact that, as easy it would be to do so, no proof has been provided after all this time)."
Greenwald made an excellent point at his Intercept piece about how journalists are cynically abusing and manipulating social media to crowd out the truth:
... one of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is ... the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus, can never be adequately corrected.... journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are using that platform constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public’s mind.
That is absolutely true. This approach is also evident in how journalists, even if their underlying content is reasonably fair, often present misleading headlines to mislead those who don't read their detailed writeups.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
