Jeff Zucker: No Regrets on CNN’s Russia Hoax Coverage, ‘We Are Not Investigators’
GNN Note – The only more henious than the one perpetrated by CNN for the past, almost, 3 years is the fact that a federal felony hoax-hate crime will no be investigated. This is beyond the pale. #twotieredjustice
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CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker is pushing back against critics accusing the news network of being one of the chief propagators of a debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after special counsel Robert Mueller cleared the president’s 2016 campaign of alleged collusion with the Kremlin.
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In an interview with the New York Times, Zucker said he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s Trump-Russia coverage and suggested it was entirely appropriate to give near around-the-clock-coverage due to the story’s magnitude. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” the CNN chief wrote in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”
According to a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings written by the Justice Department, investigators found no evidence President Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia to influence the election.
Zucker neglected to mention CNN’s steady stream of conspiracy-theory punditry and several stories which proved demonstrably false.
Last December, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju reported that Wikileaks emailed Donald Trump Jr. access to information nearly two weeks prior to their public release. However, the network failed to verify the email’s date — September 14th, 2016 — by which time the emails had already been released. In June, CNN reported former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was being investigated for meeting with a Russian banker ahead of President Trump’s inauguration. Scaramucci denied the claim and CNN eventually apologized for its inaccurate report. CNN Executive editor Lex Haris, editor Eric Lichtblau, and journalist Thomas Frank resigned in shame over the story.