As the loony right makes haste to dismiss any news report it doesn’t like as ‘fake news’, am I the only person who finds himself snickering at the similarity between the alt-right’s faux indignation at fake news and certain prominent evangelicals’ horror at gay sex? We have here, ladies and gentlemen, yet another case of the lady protesting w-a-a-a-y too much.
The Trump campaign directly benefited from fake news. Everybody knows that. It is news accounts of fake news attacking Hillary Clinton that made it a subject.
In the matter of that opposition-research dossier, the New York Times says knowledge of it, and its contents, were commonplace throughout D.C. in the last months of the campaign.
Its existence and contents became known by some Washington leaders last fall, while the presidential campaign was still going on.
CNN and other news organizations had been investigating the claims about Trump for several weeks but the report did not become public knowledge because those details could not be confirmed. Intelligence officials had presented the claims in a report to Trump but said that they, too, had not determined whether or not they were true.
CNN would not have done a story about the dossier’s existence if it hadn’t learned that intelligence officials had considered it so important that it told Trump about it, the network’s Wolf Blitzer said on Thursday. The CNN story was posted shortly after 5 p.m. EST on Tuesday.
Note that: The very news media which are now accused of fake news passed-up publishing accounts of it because, unlike Trump, they have ethical standards.
But, then, the question arises: Once CNN moved the story, didn’t they know that publication of the dossier, including the creepy undocumented story about the two hookers, became more or less inevitable? After all — every journo in D.C. had a copy.
I don’t know what was in Jake Tapper’s head when he published but … I think so. Yeah — he probably knew that somebody would go with it.
I don’t have a problem with that. We’re talking about the president, after all. Nobody is going to hold the secret of that funny little hobby over his head.