Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (24 page)

Viewers can easily get the impression that with invective like this, MSNBC doesn't even take itself seriously. CNN, however, amusingly fronts as a bona fide news network. But whatever credibility it built up since its founding in 1980 has been completely destroyed by its jihad against President Trump. Its obsession with the man is constant, disturbing, and self-destructive. An MRC analysis of a typical day's “news” coverage found that CNN filled its day entirely with Trump stories, and that its coverage was “heavily skewed” with “anti-Trump guests and on-air commentators.”
⁷⁰
Focusing on a single day of CNN coverage—May 12, 2017—MRC analysts found that an incredible 92 percent (13 hours, 27 minutes) of its coverage centered on the Trump presidency, with all other news combined occupying only 8 percent of its network's airtime. MRC concluded that 78 percent of the guests were Trump critics and just 6 percent were pro-Trump. A similar anti-Trump imbalance was displayed by CNN's own talent, as well as in the “frequent editorializing of CNN's hosts and anchors.”
⁷¹

If anything, the MRC survey downplayed CNN's bias. The network is filled with miserable mopes who do nothing but nip at the president's heels. They provide a platform for imbeciles like Brian “Humpty Dumpty” Stelter. Now, I should probably have a little sympathy for a poor guy who's somehow managed to get every major story wrong in recent memory: Richard Jewell, Michael Brown, the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, Freddie Gray, Russia collusion, FISA abuse, the Deep State, and the Covington
kids, to name a few. Humpty's judgment is so bad he became enamored with, of all people, Michael Avenatti, the Trump-hating porn star lawyer who is now a convicted felon. After Avenatti went to jail, I reminded Americans that Humpty had touted him as a potential presidential candidate. “Was that stupid on my part?” Stelter asked in response.
⁷²
Hey, Humpty, I think you're on to something.

I've long accused CNN personalities of being stenographers for CNN president Jeff Zucker. They didn't seem to like that comment—which is strange, because this was proven true by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas sting video that featured recordings of Zucker's morning calls with CNN executive producers and news staffers. In these calls, Zucker sets the day's focus for the network, such as ordering his employees to criticize Fox News, to stop being friendly with Republican senator Lindsey Graham, and to ignore other stories in favor of impeachment. In the videos, CNN's own employees complain about Zucker's direction and his all-encompassing obsession with Trump.
⁷³

The entire CNN network has incredibly thin skin. CNN reporter Donie O'Sullivan denounced the
Babylon Bee
, a satirical publication, after a
Bee
story ridiculing the Democrats' response to the killing of Soleimani drew as much attention on social media as top stories by the
New York Times
and CNN.
⁷⁴
The
Bee
struck back with a satirical piece titled, “CNN Attacks Babylon Bee: ‘The Internet Is Only Big Enough for One Fake News Site.' ” The
Bee
offered up a fake quote from Humpty: “ ‘They're obviously amateurs over there at The Bee,' said Brian Stelter. ‘A lot of times, their reporting comes true. If you're gonna do fake news, do it right—100% fake, guaranteed, 24/7. They really should learn from the pros over here at CNN.' ‘Stay out of our territory,' he growled.”
⁷⁵

And that's how you fight the Fake News, folks. Call them out. Ridicule their bias. Don't back down, and don't let them intimidate you. There's a reason why Fox News generates headlines like “FOX News Channel Dominates Basic Cable for 41 Consecutive Months in Total Day,”
⁷⁶
while CNN gets headlines like “Fox Wins Cable Battle—CNN
Loses to Cartoon Network.”
⁷⁷
It's because more and more Americans are deciding they're not going to tolerate Fake News anymore.

My team of investigative reporters and I have consistently broken news that the Fake News outlets won't cover. We have been on the cutting edge of reporting, exposing the lies of the Deep State and the mainstream media. Over the last three years, there was one story above all others that was pushed forward by the media with maximum hysteria, which we attacked as false from the very beginning, and for which we took the most abuse by the hate-Trump outlets we were questioning and contradicting. But in time we were vindicated, and now the real story is crystal clear to the American people: there was no Trump-Russia collusion.

It really wasn't hard to figure out that Russian collusion was a hoax. Days before Trump was inaugurated,
BuzzFeed
published the Steele dossier, supposed intelligence reports in which anonymous sources—mostly Russians—detailed a years-long collusion conspiracy between Trump and the Russians, including a plot to hack the 2016 presidential election. The allegations ranged from merely stupid to totally ridiculous, topped off by the asinine report that Trump, a notorious germophobe, had hired prostitutes to perform a “golden shower” urination show in a Moscow hotel room to defile a bed once used by Barack Obama. The story sounds like it's straight out of an episode of
South Park
.

Even before Congressman Devin Nunes forced out the revelation that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, it was obvious the whole thing was an outrageous fraud. Even journalists directly involved in the initial reporting on the dossier could see the problems.
BuzzFeed
editor in chief Ben Smith not only failed to corroborate the dossier, but in an internal memo he said there was “serious reason to
doubt” the report's claims.
⁷⁸
What's more, hours before
BuzzFeed
published the dossier, CNN posted a story in which anonymous Deep State stooges revealed that President Obama and President-elect Trump had been briefed on dossier allegations. We later learned that Jake Tapper, a coauthor of the CNN story, emailed Ben Smith and blasted him for printing the dossier, claiming it made the CNN story “less serious and credible.”
⁷⁹
That's right—Tapper feared if Americans could read the dossier themselves instead of relying on CNN's characterization of it, they wouldn't take it seriously. Amid all the hysteria and lies, ABC's Brian Ross managed to utter a true statement on
Good Morning America
: “If true [the dossier allegations] are a grave national security issue. If false, one of the great political smears of all time.”
⁸⁰

Despite all the dossier's credibility problems, the entire mainstream media recklessly promoted its claims. In just a five-day period, CNN mentioned “the pee tapes”
seventy-seven
times.
⁸¹
However, although the entire Washington press corps seems to have tried to confirm the dossier's collusion allegations, no evidence turned up anywhere. The
Washington Post
sent investigators to every hotel in Prague to vindicate the dossier's claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had gone there for a secret meeting with Russian conspirators—and the
Post
came up empty.
⁸²

But the media had no restraint, dropping “bombshell” after “bombshell” of new allegations of Trump campaign members colluding with Russians. Adam Schiff and other Democrat miscreants became constant fixtures on TV news shows, giving credence to the dossier and to whatever happened to be the most recent collusion fabrication.

The media ignored all the indications that the entire story was false, and they spit venom at those of us who pointed out that the dossier was a joke and that the rest of the case was built on unverifiable lies from anonymous Deep State idiots. They wouldn't even listen to their fellow Trump hater, FBI director James Comey, who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that “there've been many, many stories purportedly based on classified information, about—
well, about lots of stuff, but especially about Russia that are just dead wrong.”
⁸³
Comey described as “almost entirely wrong” a key
New York Times
story reporting that phone records and intercepted calls showed Trump associates had “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.” Not only did the
Times
refuse to retract that story, but in a stunning sign of the total corruption of the mainstream media, the article was among twelve stories on Trump-Russia collusion for which the
Times
won a prestigious George Polk Award.
⁸⁴

Unsurprisingly, the Russia collusion reporting of the
Times
and the
Washington Post
—which together were the primary drivers of the biggest Fake News story of our lifetime—were jointly awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Just look at the award citation: “For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual administration.”
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The news just doesn't get any more fake than that.

The media's obsessive coverage of the Russia hoax crowded out almost all other news. In the first five weeks after Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to head up the witch hunt, the broadcast networks spent 55 percent of their coverage of the Trump administration on the investigation, of which one-third was anonymously sourced. There was barely any room left for reporting on Trump's governing agenda—withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and the Iran nuclear deal, negotiating better trade agreements, kick-starting energy production, deregulation, expanding pipeline projects, promoting religious liberty, reforming veterans' care, and nominating constitutionalist federal appellate judges, to name a few.
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How important was the Russia hoax to the mainstream media? Speaking with his staff about the Russia collusion investigation shortly after Robert Mueller's disastrous public testimony to Congress,
New York Times
executive editor Dean Baquet admitted, “We built our newsroom to cover one story.”
⁸⁷
Think about that. The nation's most
prestigious newspaper organized its entire reporting operation to cover a single story—and it was a hoax!

As you would expect, the
Times
was put in a tough spot when Mueller found no evidence to vindicate its reporting on the dominant story of the previous two years. Here's what Baquet told his demoralized employees: “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy sh*t, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.' And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we're talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We're a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that's what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”
⁸⁸

You have to love Baquet's choice of words here. Let me translate:

• “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy sh*t, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.' ”—
  Our rabid Trump-hating subscribers were shocked that Mueller was not going to overthrow our duly elected president.
  
• “And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons.”—
  Unfortunately, Donald Trump benefited when the coup attempt against him failed.
  
• “And I think that the story changed.”—
  Our reporting was exposed as a hoax.
  
• “A lot of the stuff we're talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We're a little tiny bit flat-footed.”—
  Our leakers on the Mueller team told us six or seven weeks ago that Mueller had no evidence of collusion. We're the biggest frauds in American journalism.
  
• “I mean, that's what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”—
  I mean, that's what happens when you wildly distort a story for two years. Right?
  

The media mob met with more humiliation in this saga due to its coverage of Congressman Devin Nunes's memo revealing that the FBI used unverified allegations from the Steele dossier to get FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. First they and their Deep State allies warned that releasing the memo would endanger national security. “People must understand what is at stake by release of the bogus, contrived Nunes memo,” said disgraced Obama attorney general Eric Holder. “It uses normally protected material and puts at risk our intel capabilities in order to derail a legitimate criminal investigation. This is unheard of—it is dangerous and it is irresponsible.”
⁸⁹
Not to be outdone, CNN political analyst Brain Karem warned that Nunes was a threat to the republic, claiming that publishing the memo “is a tipping point for our democracy. Are we going to be a democracy after today, or is this going to be demagoguery and despotism?”
⁹⁰

Once the memo was released, the American people could see for themselves that there was no threat to democracy in revealing how the FBI faked evidence to spy on Carter Page. So the hate-Trump media moved to their next storyline: the memo was a dud. We were supposed to believe that it was just no big deal that the Obama administration perpetrated a fraud on the FISA court and used fake information to get warrants to spy on its political opponents. And you almost have to admire the media's messaging discipline while making this insane argument. Just look at the headlines: