The Myth of Donald (Propacanada)

#trumpswindle | #mythopoesis

Who:	HealthCarewatcher (Daily Kos)
What:	“CNN Just Reported Fake News on Justin Trudeau as Fact”
When:	15 November 2016

Via Daily Kos:

It has arrived. Nutty right wing propaganda has now been reported as fact on CNN. While watching Anderson Cooper 360, they did a story on World Leaders response to Trump. They reported as fact the following claim:

“Canadian President Justin Trudeau had called for a ban on Trump.”

First of all, Canada doesn’t have a President. It has a Prime Minister. I’ve followed Justin Trudeau because I’m really interested in Canadian politics. I really admire the Prime Minister. During the campaign to become Prime Minister, he eloquently said, “Conservatives aren’t our enemies, they’re our neighbors,” so I thought this smelled fishy. I googled this and found that CNN had plagiarized from a fake news site and reported it as fact.

A couple notes probably go here: First, this is hardly the beginning of the Trump Ministry of Propaganda; news organizations do occasionally fall for fake news. To the other, we can think what we want of CNN pulling from Hot Global News. And for whatever excuse CNN and other organizations might give, it seems especially important to pay a bit more attention to source credibility, because we are clearly in a time when falsehood can triumph simply for the fact of making Americans feel better about themselves. That is to say, sure, debunk all you want, but we will hear about this again from some passionate, (ahem!) well-informed advocate who apparently has no idea what is going on. (Never mind that last; the consequences of passionately dedicated ignorance is an inside joke that will, someday soon, and by the fortunes of the Trump administration, become rather quite relevant.)

That and something about whether the word plagiarism is the formally appropriate word, though we might also add an abstract point about forests and trees. For the record, Dan Evon’s fact check for Snopes includes the note that Hot Global News is “a site that clearly states in its disclaimer that it is a satire (i.e., fake news) publication and does not publish factual stories”.

Daily Kos diarist HealthCarewatcher makes the obvious point: “CNN needs to run a correction at the top of the program tomorrow, and explain to its viewers why and how they reported fake news as fact.” To the other, CNN likely isn’t going to fire Michelle Kosinski; this is not the kind of thing CNN fires people for^α.

____________________

^α Six years ago, Glenn Greenwald considered what CNN fires people for:

CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, because of a now-deleted tweet she wrote on Sunday upon learning of the death of one of the Shiite world’s most beloved religious figures: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah . . . . One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and other neocon precincts, and CNN quickly (and characteristically) capitulated to that pressure by firing her. The network―which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years―justified its actions by claiming that Nasr’s “credibility” had been “compromised.”

Image note: Photo by Tannen Maury/epa/Corbis.

Cooper, Anderson and Michelle Kosinski. Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees. CNN. 15 November 2016.

Evon, Don. “No, Canada”. Snopes. 26 January 2016.

Greenwald, Glenn. “Octavia Nasr’s firing and what The Liberal Media allows”. Salon. 8 July 2010.

HealthCarewatcher. “CNN Just Reported Fake News on Justin Trudeau as Fact”. Daily Kos. 15 November 2016.