Evidently, CNN’s Chris Cuomo does not watch CNN.
At least, that’s what I assume after seeing him dare Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wisc., to name a single “wrong fact” CNN aired over the course of its coverage of the two-year Russian collusion news cycle, nearly all of which appears to have been false and idle speculation.
“If the media was doing its job, [Americans] would be far more skeptical of some of the details that they got,” the congressman said Wednesday.
Duffy added, “You’re the reporters! [You] have a job to make sure you’re putting out the right facts, and for two years you put out the wrong facts!”
An incredulous Cuomo shot back, “What wrong facts? What wrong facts did we put out?”
I’m glad he asked. There were several major media failures, a significant number of which came from CNN.
In 2017, for example, CNN reported that longtime Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci had ties to a $10 billion Russian investment fund owned by a Kremlin-connected bank. That story had to be retracted because it wasn’t true, and three CNN staffers had to resign as a result.
The network also reported that same year that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions “did not disclose Russia meetings in security clearance form,” clearly suggesting the former lawmaker tried to conceal secret contacts with foreign entities who may or may not have conspired to steal the 2016 presidential election. CNN had to report later — and to little fanfare, despite having created a fake scandal with its original story — that Sessions had been instructed specifically by the FBI officials who walked him through the application process that he didn’t need to list meetings he took when he was a senator.
CNN also repeated the almost certainly bogus charge that former FBI Director James Comey was fired shortly after requesting additional resources for the Russia investigation. Then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who is no Trump flunkie, testified later that the allegation was a work of fiction.
In 2017, CNN was forced to issue embarrassing on-air corrections after it claimed the Trump campaign received advance notice during the 2016 presidential election of WikiLeaks’ plans to dump thousands of hacked emails belonging to Democratic National Committee staffers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In 2018, former Obama official and CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto reported incorrectly that Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of European Command and the NATO supreme allied commander, Europe, said he doesn’t believe there’s an effective U.S. response to Russian cyber threats. Scaparrotti, it turns out, said no such thing.
CNN also reported that the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was willing to testify that Trump knew “in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in which Russians were expected to offer his campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton.” The report hinged entirely on an anonymous source who turned out to be attorney Lanny Davis, who said later the network’s reporters had misinterpreted what he said.
Earlier this month, CNN reported that Trump’s Russia lawyers made edits to false testimony given to Congress by Cohen. CNN amended the story quietly after publication because the article’s most significant claims were not true.
This is to say nothing of the hundreds of hours the network dedicated to its commentators fantasizing, theorizing, and speculating endlessly about whether Vladimir Putin had installed a puppet in the White House, including when CNN analyst Ret. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters accused the president of “treason.”
The only thing more astounding than Cuomo’s apparent ignorance of CNN’s flawed coverage is that his boss, Jeff Zucker, defended the network’s record this week by saying, “We are not investigators. We are journalists.” That explains a lot.
