One of the best ways to tell when an alleged ”scandal” is running out of steam is when liberal Democrats appear on cable news television programs and join conservative Republicans in slamming the credibility of “anonymous” sources. That’s what happened when liberal Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tuesday's Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Channel.
It didn’t take much to prod Greemwald into talking about the long-running campaign against Donald Trump and discuss the many flaws in that “scandal.”
Greenwald began by hammering the coverage on other cable television programs:
I find it to be -- and obviously this is a high bar -- one of the most humiliating and scandalous moments in the entire media behavior of the Trump-Russia saga. You know, I've been on your show to talk about a lot of these humiliating moments, and this might be one of the worst ones yet.
The liberal guest had earlier stated: “Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time.”
Greenwald continued: “[W]hat's so crucial about this is that, after former [lawyer and Clinton Administration colleague] Lanny Davis went on CNN with Anderson Cooper.”
“And to Cooper's shock, he admitted that everything CNN had been breathlessly hyping as true was actually false,” namely that former special counselor was there when Trump learned about the Trump Tower meeting in advance.”
“The Washington Post and the New York Post listened to that and they said: ‘Wait a minute! We independently confirmed CNN's stories based on an anonymous source, and our anonymous source was Lanny Davis, who's now saying the whole thing is false.’”
“So they did what they had to do,” Greenwald stated, and what they should have done which is, they retracted the story, they outed their own source, they said our anonymous source was Lanny Davis, and we now retract it because he says it's false.
“CNN couldn't do that because they lied to the entire world,” Greenwald noted. “They said ..., that they tried to get ahold of Lanny Davis, and he refused to comment, when in fact of course Lanny Davis was also their source and they don't want to admit that they lied to the world.”
“So they can't retract the story, and they can't admit they lied,” he continued. “So they're just continuing to stick to what everybody knows it's a lie, but not many people care because people think -- a lot of people anyway that it was done for the right political agenda.”
Whatever the event is called, it certainly doesn’t boost the network’s free-falling audience numbers, which show that MSNBC has clearly surpassed CNN regarding viewership. Hopefully, the folks at both channels won’t fall back because they’re not liberal enough.
