In the Trump years, CNN oppressively promoted the conspiracy theory of Donald Trump's "collusion" with the Russian government to get elected in 2016. So they were heartbroken when Robert Mueller's investigation ended with a negative verdict: "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy climbed to the mountaintop of shamelessness in his so-called "Reliable Sources" newsletter on Feb. 8 under the heading "The Collusion Delusion." Who's delusional now? House Republicans investigating the role of the Biden campaign and the "intelligence community" in Twitter's suspension of the New York Post over a Hunter Biden story.
This is not a "news" letter.
"Republicans are living in a reality distortion field," Darcy began. He blustered there was "no real evidence" to support the claim that Twitter bowed to government bureaucrats when they suppressed the Hunter laptop story and branded it as toxic misinformation. Just forget all the reporting that Twitter executives had weekly meetings with the FBI (which had the laptop in its possession) and engaged in a "tabletop exercise" about "hack-and-leak" operations with the Department of Homeland Security. That's some thick smoke, if not fire.
Darcy continued: "Republicans were unrelenting in peddling it to the American public. At Wednesday's hearing, they showed no regard for misinforming those who turn to them for accurate information, or the fact that they were smearing a private business and its former executives in the process."
It's not "smearing" to make the former Twitter chieftains testify. Liberals just don't like other liberals being on the wrong end of the hardball questions.
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Darcy accused Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, of "tossing asinine red meat to the Republican base." He put the word "censor" in scare quotes to describe Twitter's overwrought 17-day suspension of the New York Post Twitter account and the suspension of Twitter accounts that dared to tweet out a link to the Post expose.
But probably the most hypocritical passage in this purple prose was about election denial: With this hearing, "Republicans are not so subtly feeding their election-denying base reason to believe that the 2020 election was effectively rigged against Donald Trump."
Earth to Darcy: What did your network obsess about in the Trump years? We could easily counter with "CNN was not so subtly feeding its election-denying base reason to believe that the 2016 election was effectively rigged against Hillary Clinton."
Darcy, who believes that Fox News should be de-platformed, then ranted that Fox News recounted "the nonsense coming out of the hearing as if it were a serious affair uncovering considerable wrongdoing. The facts -- reality -- simply do not matter."
But it's Darcy who is pushing the transparently counterfactual narrative that there is no such thing as Big Tech "intentionally and unjustly censoring conservative views," when the evidence is ubiquitous. MRC Free Speech America's CensorTrack.org database has reached the milestone of 5,000 verified incidents of conservatives being censored, suspended, and canceled.
This fervently opinionated "Reliable Sources" report is the latest proof that CNN CEO Chris Licht has accomplished nothing in his supposed effort to make CNN a place for fair and respectful dialogue and analysis. Darcy claims Republicans are "asinine" red meat throwers who don't care about facts in any way. CNN is not working to earn the trust of Republicans and their leaders. They're still working overtime to discredit Republicans as they throw their red meat at their own Democrat audience.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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