Exposé of Fake News Machine CNN
Written by Laurie Higgins Illinois Family
A bombshell undercover video narrated by James O’Keefe and released on Tuesday, June 27, 2017, shows CNN supervising producer John Bonifield admitting that the Trump collusion tale is “mostly bullsh*t” that CNN pushes because it’s a ratings blockbuster.
Bonifield admits what is obvious to many Americans about the mainstream media’s evidence for the endless Russia story: “We don’t have any big giant proof….I just feel like they don’t really have it, but they want to keep digging.”
When asked why CNN is “constantly like, Russia this, Russia that,” Bonifield answers, “Because it’s ratings….Our ratings are incredible now.”
Fifteen-year journalist and producer veteran Bonifield agrees with Trump that the dominant media’s obsessive pursuit of this story for which there is no evidence is a “witch hunt”: “I think the president is probably right to say…’you are witch-hunting me.’” Bonifield admits it’s a witch hunt because there is “no smoking gun” and “no real proof.”
Bonifield claims the laser focus on the nonexistent Trump-Russia collusion tale is being orchestrated from the top with CNN CEO Jeff Zucker ordering journalists to “get back to Russia,” after taking a day to cover Trump’s decision to pull out the of the climate accords.
Bonifield mocks the naïve concerns of ordinary people about journalistic ethics: “It’s a business. People are like, the media has an ethical—pssshhh….all the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school, you’re just like, that’s adorable. That’s adorable. This is a business. Especially cable news. Cable news isn’t the New York Times. It’s not even like NBC News. I mean, NBC News gets like 20 million viewers a night. Cable news is getting a million. So they gotta do what they gotta do to make their money.”
Glimmers of behind-the-scenes truth-telling continue as Bonifield acknowledges how differently Trump is being treated relative to Obama: “I think there are a lot of liberal CNN viewers who want to really see Trump really get scrutinized….if we would have behaved that way with President Obama and scrutinized everything that he was doing with as much scrutiny as we apply to Donald Trump, I think our viewers would have been turned off….they would have felt like we were attacking him.”
But even as Bonifield admits the CNN bias, he inadvertently demonstrates it when he refers to our former president as “President Obama” and to our current president as “Donald Trump.”
Bonifield confesses that he is not alone in seeing the truth about the fake news business: “I love the news business, but I’m very cynical about it and…so are most of my colleagues. I’m not alone.”
This deeply troubling exposé comes on the heels of CNN being forced to retract a Russia story and issue an apology on the weekend, following which CNN management imposed strict oversight rules that require all Russia stories to be run by top editors prior to publication. Perhaps these rules would have been unnecessary if CNN journalists had taken those cutesy little ethics taught in journalism school a bit more seriously.
Now if only the U.S. Senate would demonstrate an interest in ethics that CNN lacks by censuring lyin’ Chuck Shumer (D-NY) whose whopper about Trump being investigated by the FBI—when Shumer knew he was not being investigated—was just exposed by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA).
