CNN fails to comprehend basic concepts of journalism

submitted by dystopianfuturetoday
1 decade 3 years 10 months 4 weeks ago
Greenwald schools CNN idiots on WikiLeaks

34 Comments

Xaxsays...

CNN is a disgusting joke. These days when you visit their website it's goofy shit about viral videos and celebrity gossip. Burn in hell, CNN, you traitorous corporate whore.

NetRunnersays...

I had to go back and re-watch the intro to know who the blonde Nazi they put up against Glenn was.

Answer: Fran Townsend, former Bush Homeland Security Adviser.

That explains the following pivot, which literally made me laugh out loud:


Townsend: Even Julian Assange himself has not made the argument that what he's doing is some sort of public service. ... He made no distinctions about the harm he might be doing to foreign governments, to the US government, to diplomats and soldiers around the world, he just wholesale threw this all out there.

Greeenwald: (Crosstalk) That's totally false. That's just a lie. He's published less than 1% of the 250,000 diplomatic cables that he came into possession of. ...

Townsend, shrilly: He has threatened to publish much more than he has, and there isn't any-- You know the notion that we should be grateful he hasn't committed a far larger crime than he's already committed is ridiculous!


...and this is after Glenn explained at length that journalists shouldn't be in the habit of calling people criminals until they've been convicted of a crime, or at the very least charged with one!

Oh, and anyone who's watched a single interview with Assange understands that he does think he's providing a public service. He doesn't use that phrase, but when he says stuff like "I believe it's important for people to know what secrets their government is keeping" he isn't talking about doing it for his own personal gain.

I swear, they have some sort of class they send these people to that trains them to pack as many lies as possible in as few words as possible. That way, anyone who responds won't have the opportunity to refute them all in a cable news interview, and at least some will get through to people unchallenged.

bobknight33says...

I say Assange is not guilty. All he did is made public the documents. He did not steal them.

HULU has a documentary on the Pentagon Papers. Titled The most Dangerous man in America.

1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, concluded that the war is based on decades of lies and subsequently leaks 7,000 pages of top secret documents to The New York Times.

The Most Dangerous Man in America.

ryanbennittsays...

The good thing about that interview was that Glenn got to explain his stance clearly and uninterrupted, he wasn't shouted down like you might expect some "journalist" anchors to do, so the arguments he put forth were heard clearly. So even though Jessica had taken sides, she was a fair anchor and I commend her for that. Fran had obviously been given a stance to stand from which she couldn't back down. She never once tried to actually counter Glenn's arguments, she just kept reiterating the party line. In this respect she's just a parrot, which makes her look like somebody's pawn, which is a coincidence, as she got completely pwned in the interview.

NetRunnersays...

>> ^ryanbennitt:

The good thing about that interview was that Glenn got to explain his stance clearly and uninterrupted, he wasn't shouted down like you might expect some "journalist" anchors to do, so the arguments he put forth were heard clearly. So even though Jessica had taken sides, she was a fair anchor and I commend her for that.

I understand that by today's really, really, really low standards, having the anchor refrain from shouting down the person who's arguing against the conventional wisdom seems like a positive, but you need to put it in perspective a bit.

Yellin's job isn't to just make sure people give each other a chance to speak, she's supposed to know something about the topic, and to try and correct (or at least call out) falsehoods if she hears them.

As Glenn said in the article gwiz linked, this interview had two big, universal whoppers that any journalist worth their salt should be calling out. Namely, the lie that Assange released everything indiscriminately, and the accusation that releasing the documents was a crime, even though he hasn't been charged with anything for that.

Furthermore, Frauline Townsend is supposed to be a journalist herself now (she's a CNN employee!), and not just a mouthpiece for the powers that be. Hell, even if she sees her job as that of an embedded propagandist, she would be more effective if she made valid arguments against what Assange did, instead of these fraudulent ad hominem attacks.

Porksandwichsays...

Gotta use strong words to help the public get their opinion. If the public opinion is opposite of what you want them to think, it makes it hard to build multi-billionaire TV programs people pay to watch (or at least watch enough that they help them get paid).

There's just too much information out there for people to process it all, and the news stations have learned it's easier to tell people what their opinions should be than give them enough information to form an opinion based on fact.

And what's worse is that a lot of the things they spend so much time on have very small chances of actually impacting the lives of the majority of the viewers and citizenry in general. Stuff that has impact on day to day lives is barely covered....they wrap you in so many useless topics that's all you can think about or discuss with people...because that's all they know......since that's all that's covered. It's like celebrity gossip, I really don't care (or shouldn't) if some rich white person has adopted yet another non-white baby or whose winning what dancing/singing competition. But that's what you find everyone discussing......because that's all they cover on the morning news aside from who got shot the night before or what burned down.....or how to drive in the snow for the 15th time.

Yogisays...

I'm not sure why this was allowed to happen. This man shouldn't have been asked to even be on CNN...the network is clearly slipping and should go back into full on Propaganda mode soon enough.

sirexsays...

The news clips of cnn and fox news on sites like videosift over the years is truely amazing. Its terrible how bad the standards are on these outlets.

Things that translate to "ok, you've just made me look like a total idiot on my own station, so im going to talk to the other person, give them a loaded question, and ignore totally what you just said.".

vexsays...

As much a Yellin comes off as being a corporate shill, she still gave Greenwald much more time to talk than Townsend. What she failed to do while Fran was talking is point out the blatant misinformation and lies that were coming out of her mouth. In other words, she didn't do her fucking job.

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