Three journalists resigned as CNN was caught in the vortex of “fake news”

CNN has been caught up in a “fake news” storm recently. Due to a flaw in a report about the “Russiagate”, CNN withdrew the report and apologized publicly, and three senior employees involved were forced to resign. The report, which was broadcast on the 22nd, was titled “Congress investigates the connection between a Russian investment fund and US government officials”, saying that Trump’s friend Anthony Scaramucci was being investigated by the US Senate because of his unusual relationship with a powerful Russian fund. However, the article was removed from the website just one day after it was broadcast, and CNN subsequently issued an apology letter. CNN said in the letter: “This report did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been withdrawn… CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.” However, the matter did not end there. CNN issued an internal email on the 24th, requesting to strengthen the review of reports involving Russia. On the 26th, Thomas Frank, the reporter responsible for the report, another senior investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, and a senior editor Lexi Harris resigned and were immediately approved. It is worth mentioning that Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and Frank was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Although CNN did not admit that there were false contents in the report, the public opinion believed that if CNN had confidence in the report, it would never punish several big-name reporters so severely. Trump, who has long been ridiculed by mainstream media such as CNN, naturally would not miss this opportunity. Early in the morning of the 27th, he sent several tweets to bombard CNN. “Wow! CNN withdrew a big report about Russia, and three employees were forced to resign. What about their other fake news? Fake news!” Trump said, “They caught the fake news CNN red-handed, but what about NBC, CBS, and ABC? What about the failed New York Times and Washington Post? They are all fake news!” It rains on a leaking roof, and the deviation in the report is not the only trouble for CNN recently. The conservative media “One America News Network” forwarded a video on the 27th, in which a senior CNN news producer revealed that the reason why CNN hyped the Trump administration’s “collusion with Russia” was entirely for ratings. “I feel like they (CNN reporters) don’t have any evidence, but they still want to dig deeper, so the president said it’s okay for the media to engage in ‘political persecution,'” said CNN senior producer John Bonifeld. “Our ratings are incredible now,” Bonifeld said. According to statistics from the same American news network, since Trump was sworn in, CNN has mentioned Russia nearly 16,000 times in its news broadcasts, and CNN’s ratings in May this year were almost twice that of the same period last year, which means that CNN’s revenue from reporting on Trump’s alleged “collusion with Russia” may reach millions of dollars. According to Bonifeld, it was the CNN leadership’s intention to hype up the “Russia collusion.” At the White House regular press conference on the 27th, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders also called on all reporters present to watch the short film. She also sarcastically said to CNN: “If people can’t trust media reports, it will be very dangerous for the United States. Now some media are moving in this direction for ratings, and if this practice is decided by the media’s top management, it will be even more terrible.” In fact, CNN’s credibility has long been questioned in the United States. Searching for keywords such as “CNN” and “fake news” on the Internet will get tens of millions of results. Earlier this month, a video circulated online showing a well-known CNN reporter directing a group of women to gather in front of the camera as a backdrop after the terrorist attacks in London.