CNN Retracts

Journalism as an honest trade is largely dead. Major news outlets are either driven by partisan ideology or the broader issue of being underfunded and understaffed as all the eyeballs and money move toward entertainment. The money always was in entertainment, but corporate types previously subsidized their news operations out of a noblesse oblige. That’s all gone now. You have to dig hard to find any professionals behind all the 25-year old senior editors using pop culture group think and hyperbolized passion in the place of reporting.

CNN retracted a story it published earlier in the week about some Trump associate doing some deal with a Russian bank. Executives at CNN were shocked to learn their investigative reporter went with a story with only one anonymous source versus the requisite two. Also, the story was never run by CNN fact checkers, as if that’s a thing. Three CNN employees involved in the story chain were asked to resign. That’s a very new thing at CNN, or they’ve done the same in super secret for their last twenty debunked stories.

Very clearly there’s a media stampede to publish anti-Trump stories. And an equal rush of long time government workers to share as-needed to feed the resistance. Even providing classified documents. Provided they’re unnamed so they can be the world’s wimpiest whistleblowers. This isn’t the first time one or more major news outlets has had a hard-on for the sitting President. It is the first time journalists inside such an organization assumed they’d be lauded as heroes for publishing non-corroborated, non-vetted rushed investigative pieces because it fit their corporate news narrative. That’s kind of scary.

It’s almost impossible for the average person to find reasonably fact checked news. Newspapers were never truly objective; though they were also never this blatantly bad. The Fourth Estate has gone the way of quality rock ‘n’ roll and girls with hairy bushes. A distant memory of better days.

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