Journalists covering foreign powers walk a fine line between reporting the facts and repeating propaganda, especially during wartime. MSNBC and CNN may have crossed that line in their coverage of the precipitous fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Both networks appeared to carry messages crafted by the Islamist group’s spin doctors for consumption in the West.
CNN essentially acknowledged that it conveyed material the Taliban urgently wanted to broadcast to an international audience on Saturday’s “CNN Newsroom,” which featured Clarissa Ward touring a former U.S. military base now used as a base of operations by the Taliban. Host Michael Holmes introduced the segment by saying, “The Taliban [is] making a full use of American military equipment” that “American troops, as they withdrew, simply left behind.”
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