President Trump isn’t ready to let up on CNN, with which he has been locked in a feud for months.
The feud, as it were, took a heated turn this week when the president tweeted out a video of him “wrestling” the network to the ground. This inspired CNN to go way beyond the pale in their efforts to expose the creator of the video, a Redditor with a questionable history of social media posts. After bullying the user into an apology, the network published a bizarre statement advising that while they were withholding the user’s real name, they reserved the right to go back on that should the user disavow his apology and return to his trolling ways. This statement inspired many in the media to accuse CNN of blackmailing the Redditor for their own purposes. Some even mused that the network might have broken the law.
Asked about the controversy in Warsaw on Thursday, Trump said, “I think what CNN did was unfortunate for them, as you know now they have some pretty serious problems. They have been fake news for a long time. They have been covering me in a very, very dishonest way.”
He said the network took his wrestling tweet “too seriously,” hurting themselves in the process. However, he reminded reporters that they weren’t the only news network profiting off a vendetta against his administration.
“NBC is equally as bad, despite the fact that I made them a fortune with ‘The Apprentice,’ but they forgot that,” said Trump.
To describe CNN’s recent missteps as “unfortunate” is an understatement on the part of the president. The first big blow to their credibility came a couple of weeks ago when the network was faced with a $10 million libel lawsuit after publishing an ill-sourced bit of fake news regarding a Trump associate named Anthony Scaramucci. Filled with poorly-conceived claims that accused Scaramucci of telling his Russian business partners that Trump might lift U.S sanctions, the story was quickly retracted and its authors were subsequently fired.
Then came James O’Keefe’s undercover videos, which showed CNN producers and talent criticizing U.S. voters as “stupid” and admitting that there was nothing to the Russian collusion narrative that the network pursued endlessly in the quest for ratings.
To top all of that off with an unwise threat to “expose” a kid on social media who had the bad luck to have his meme tweeted by the president shows you just how far from the news path CNN was wandered.
