CNN has officially turned on its left-wing compatriot Buzzfeed in an attempt to save face over the imploding story of a scandalous Russian plot to supposedly blackmail Donald Trump.
As the Daily Wire has chronicled, CNN has repeatedly exposed itself over the last year as an overtly biased news source, but the egregiously dishonest network has really taken things to the next level since Trump demonstrated that the establishment media has officially been dethroned. Clearly attempting to provide fodder for their mainstream colleagues for the president-elect’s first press conference, a day before the event CNN chose to report about a scandalous tale of a Machiavellian Russian plot to blackmail Trump based on an utterly unsubstantiated 35-page report by a former intelligence source (who has since been named). Buzzfeed took things a step further by going ahead and publishing the full, lurid, completely unverified dossier, which had been circulating in news circles for a year and included wild sexual allegations about Trump, Russian prostitutes, and urinating on a bed.
The story began to collapse the second it went up and by Wednesday had fully imploded. So CNN did what CNN does, it looked for someone to blame — or at least for someone to whom it could deflect some of the blame. That someone was Buzzfeed. In the statement CNN issued Wednesday, the network shamelessly called out Buzzfeed in the very first line:
CNN’s decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than Buzzfeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this. They are using Buzzfeed’s decision to deflect from CNN’s reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations.
CNN then doubled down on its report and even patted itself on the back for doing the work it was supposed to do: “informing the people”…
We are fully confident in our reporting. It represents the core of what the First Amendment protects, informing the people of the inner workings of their government; in this case, briefing materials prepared for President Obama and President-elect Trump last week.
The only problem with that claim, is that it turns out CNN appears to have had their facts wrong about what exactly President-elect Trump was actually briefed on. But no matter, CNN concludes by reminding everyone again that they were not nearly as negligent as Buzzfeed because they at least did not publish the dossier:
We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report’s allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.
Buzzfeed has since responded by trying to sortakinda take the high road, the outlet’s Ben Smith saying they are “not going to participate in an attempt to divide the media against each other.”
Buzzfeed’s CEO also responded defiantly to Trump’s undressing of them and CNN for their spreading of “fake news”:
In other words, both news outlets admit nothing, regret nothing, and learned nothing.