By Buck Sexton
Opinion Contributor
Is CNN the most trusted name in news? Let’s look at a recent example and you can come to your own conclusion about this. You had a big story that just broke the last couple of weeks that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer who has “flipped” against him in court, had information that proved or could perhaps sway a jury that President Trump knew about that infamous Trump Tower meeting before it happened.
The media jumped all over this.
CNN, citing “multiple sources,” said that this was, in fact, the case. Among the bylines on that piece, Carl Bernstein of “Woodward and Bernstein” fame.
So now you think to yourself, this has all the makings of a major scoop, right?
But then there’s a little problem: Cohen had already testified under oath to Congress that that was not the case. So his lawyer, Lanny Davis, knew that he was going to have to walk it back.
CNN’s scoop says that Cohen would say that Trump knew in advance, then we find out from Cohen’s lawyer that’s not the case. Lanny Davis comes forward and says there is no such information because that’s not true and that he should have spoken about things a little bit differently. On top of that, you have BuzzFeed coming out with a story that says that the source for that initial Michael Cohen story, that big bombshell about how we were going to find out the truth about that Trump Tower meeting and what Trump knew and when he knew it — the source was Lanny Davis.
Now, people are turning to CNN and saying, that was the big story you ran with, Lanny Davis says it’s not only inaccurate, now we’re being told that Lanny Davis was the source for the inaccurate story, don’t you have to offer up some sort of retraction? Oh no. CNN claims that they have multiple sources and that they stand by their reporting entirely and that we don’t know who their sources are so they’re just not going to change anything.
Folks, come on. Let’s all be serious, let’s be adults about this. There’s no way when you look at this timeline that Lanny Davis wasn’t somehow involved at least in this initial breaking news story that got a ton of traction at CNN. Nor is this the first time. There have been multiple stories at CNN that has had to correct in part or retract in whole. All of them are anti-Trump. When you’re making the same mistake in the same direction each and every time, it feels much less like this is just an error of doing tough, gumshoe journalism and much more like perhaps there is an ideology at work.
If CNN wants to be the core of the anti-Trump resistance as journalists, that’s fine, it’s their right. But I just wish they would be more honest about that. And I think that the public’s understanding of where CNN stands on these issues is driving a lot of their reluctance to come clean about the fact that they’re running with anti-Trump sources that they know to be untrustworthy or should know to be less than credible. And then when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar? They don’t want to correct it, they don’t want to change it because it served the purpose at the time which was being anti-Trump.
So is CNN the most trusted name in news? I’ll let you answer that question.
Buck Sexton is the co-host of “Rising,” Hill.TV’s morning news show.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.
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