CNN Is Dead: Network Loses All Credibility As Producer Admits That The Entire Russia Narrative Is Fake News

Nobody else needs to dig a grave for CNN because they are doing it themselves.  There has been scandal after scandal at the network, and now one of their producers has been caught on undercover video admitting that CNN has been pushing fake news stories about a connection between Donald Trump and Russia in a desperate attempt to get ratings.  In other words, CNN’s entire Russia narrative has been a complete lie all along.  Unfortunately for CNN, they are going to discover that once your credibility is gone it is incredibly difficult to ever get it back.

On Tuesday, Project Veritas made headlines all over the world when it released undercover video of CNN Producer John Bonifield admitting that CNN’s Russia narrative is fake news.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you can view the entire video right here.  Now that this video has been made public, I don’t see how CNN is ever going to recover from this.  When one of your top producers admits that the story you have been pushing for months is basically a load of cow manure, it is impossible to maintain the pretense that you are a legitimate news organization any longer…

Project Veritas has released a video of CNN Producer John Bonifield who was caught on hidden-camera admitting that there is no proof to CNN’s Russia narrative.

“I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now,” Bonifield says. “Like, we don’t have any giant proof.”

He confirms that the driving factor at CNN is ratings:

“It’s a business, people are like the media has an ethical phssssss… All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you’re just like, that’s adorable. That’s adorable. This is a business.”

And of course this comes on the heels of three reporters being forced out of CNN for publishing a false story that attempted to link a Russian investment fund with Trump…

Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday.

The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a network spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

President Trump has taken a lot of heat for referring to CNN as “fake news”, but after the events of the past several days he has been completely vindicated.

And once news broke of three reporters being forced out of the network for a false story about Russia, he took a bit of a victory lap with this tweet

Wow, CNN had to retract big story on “Russia,” with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!

This is such a shame, because I always liked CNN’s election coverage compared to the other networks.  John King always did such a great job breaking things down county by county, and Wolf Blitzer always made things seem so dramatic.

But now it is exceedingly difficult to see any sort of a future for the network after all of this.

And of course other major news outlets have been guilty of pushing fake news about Russia too.  The following comes from the Intercept

Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

But with CNN it has always been on another level, and we now have a top insider on tape admitting that a connection between Trump and Russia is being pushed even though there isn’t any evidence.  In fact, Bonifield says that CNN CEO Jeff Zucker has been personally pushing this angle himself

“Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN (Jeff Zucker) said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that, let’s get back to Russia.”

I can’t imagine that Zucker gets to keep his job now that this has been revealed.

It may not happen immediately, but look for him to be shown the door in the not too distant future.

All along, Trump has insisted that this whole thing with Russia has been a “witch hunt”, and that is what I have been saying too.  And it turns out that Bonifield feels the exact same way

“I just feel like they don’t really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the President is probably right to say, like, look you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.”

If this doesn’t kill “the Russia story”, I don’t know what will.

This whole thing has been a massive charade from the very beginning, and the big news networks have been endlessly pushing it for ratings.

In their zeal to destroy Trump, they have “jumped the shark” and have destroyed their own credibility instead.

Once upon a time, most mainstream journalists at least attempted to pretend that they were being objective, but those days are long gone.

Today, it is absolutely imperative for all of us to understand that everyone has an agenda.  In other words, every single person that you see on television is trying to get a message across.  So instead of taking in news and entertainment passively, we need to have our filters up and we need to be thinking for ourselves.

Fortunately, episodes such as this one tend to awaken a lot of people, and more Americans than ever are sick and tired of the lies and misinformation that they are constantly being fed.

It Is About Time That We Had A President That Was Willing To Go To War With The Mainstream Media

Donald Trump Waving - Public DomainThursday afternoon’s press conference was perhaps the most memorable moment of Donald Trump’s presidency so far.  Trump’s blistering attack on the media was quite a spectacle, but the truth is that it was desperately needed.  For decades, the mainstream media has dominated political discourse in this country no matter who has been in control of the White House or Congress.  They have become masters of guiding and shaping public opinion, and in recent years they have completely discarded any pretense of being “unbiased” or “objective”.  These monolithic media organizations relentlessly push the progressive agenda of their owners (the global elite), and that is why the “news” always seems to be just about the same no matter which network it is coming from.  Their monopoly is slowly being broken by the rise of the alternative media, but the truth is that most Americans still rely on just a handful of ultra-powerful media organizations for their news.

So when Trump brutally attacked the mainstream media at his press conference on Thursday, millions upon millions of Americans greatly rejoiced, because they finally got what was coming to them.  And then on Friday, Trump posted a message to Twitter calling the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN “the enemy of the American people”…

After Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in November, many in the mainstream media started referring to the pro-Trump alternative media as “fake news”, but now Trump has totally turned that insult against them. 

For weeks Trump has been referring to CNN as “fake news”, but on Friday he said that he was now going to refer to them as “very fake news”.  The following exchange between Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta comes from the official White House website

Q    Just because of the attack of fake news and attacking our network, I just want to ask you, sir — 

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m changing it from fake news, though.

Q    Doesn’t that undermine — 

THE PRESIDENT:  Very fake news now.  (Laughter.) 

We have never seen an exchange quite like that between a president of the United States and a prominent member of the mainstream media, but it was well overdue…

For eight years, the mainstream media gushed and fawned over Barack Obama because he supported the progressive agenda of the global elite, but now that Trump is in the White House virtually every story from the mainstream media is negative.

So when Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon refers to them as “the opposition party” he is right on target…

In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

At this point, the mainstream media is so desperate to portray Trump as a bad guy that they have resorted to a modern day version of McCarthyism.  For decades, liberals always pointed to McCarthyism as one of the greatest examples of paranoia and intolerance in modern American history, but now they are doing the exact same thing to Trump

A bizarre feature of the present confrontation is that the Democrats and liberals have relaunched McCarthyism, something they would have decried as a toxic episode in American political history until a few months ago. Just as Senator Joe McCarthy claimed in 1950 to have a list of communist infiltrators in the State Department, so any contact between a Trump supporter or official and a Russian is now being reported as suspicious and potentially treacherous. It is difficult to see where Trump is wrong when he tweeted that “the Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly, so they made up a story – RUSSIA. Fake news!”

The reason why many of us constantly refer to the mainstream media as a single entity is because it really is very tightly controlled.  You see, the truth is that more than 90 percent of the news, information and entertainment that Americans get through their televisions comes from just 6 giant media corporations.  And of course those 6 enormous corporations are owned and controlled by the elite of the world.

The war for our society is a war for hearts and minds, and the reason why the elite have made so much progress is because most Americans allow thousands upon thousands of hours of “programming” to be constantly pumped into their heads.

The following numbers come directly from Nielsen, and they show how much news, information and entertainment average Americans consume through various methods each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using  a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add the top two categories together, the average American consumes more than five hours of television every single day.

And when you add all of those categories together, the average American is plugged into “the matrix” in some way for more than 10 hours a day.

We are literally subjecting ourselves to a form of very powerful mind control, and the extraordinary power of the media is something that I addressed in my novel.  There are some people that actually cannot stand complete silence because they have become so accustomed to having something “on” all the time.  As a society, we are absolutely addicted to entertainment, but there is always an agenda behind that entertainment.  This is something that I talked about in a previous article

Virtually every television show, movie, song, book, news broadcast and talk show is trying to shape how you view reality.  Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly being bombarded with messages about what is true and what is not, about what is right and what is wrong, and about what really matters and what is unimportant.  Even leaving something out or ignoring something completely can send an extremely powerful message.

When Donald Trump said that the mainstream media is “the enemy of the American People”, he was 100 percent correct.

If our country is going to have a positive future, the immense power that these media corporations have over the general population must be broken.

It is about time that we had a president that was willing to go to war with the mainstream media, and I greatly applaud President Trump for the stand that he is taking.

The Chart That Proves That The Mainstream Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment

Employment-Population Ratio 2013The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a “four-year low” of 7.7 percent.  But is unemployment in the United States actually going down?  After all, you would think that it should be.  The Obama administration has “borrowed” more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to “stimulate” the economy.  So have those efforts been successful?  Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily.  Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that “236,000 jobs” were added to the economy in February, but what they didn’t tell you was that the number of Americans “not in the labor force” rose by 296,000.  And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down – by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don’t want jobs.  Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago.  And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis.  For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007.  But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then.  So where in the world is this “economic recovery” that they keep talking about?

At this point, the “unemployment rate” has become so meaningless that it really isn’t even worth paying much attention to.  If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.

As Wikipedia tells us, many economists consider the employment-population ratio to be far superior to other measurements of employment…

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the employment rate as the employment-to-population ratio. The employment-population ratio is many American economist’s favorite gauge of the American jobs picture. According to Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, “The employment population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions.” This is a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.

A chart of the employment-population ratio in the United States over the past several years is posted below…

Employment-Population Ratio 2013

As you can see, the percentage of Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to below 59 percent during the last economic crisis.  Since that time, it has not risen back above 59 percent.  This is the first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment rate bounce back following a recession.  At this point, the employment-population ratio has been below 59 percent for 42 months in a row.

Yes, we should be thankful that things have stabilized, but as you can see there has been no recovery.  The percentage of Americans with a job is essentially exactly where it was three years ago.  Despite the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed, and despite the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing, the employment situation in the U.S. has not turned around.

Data for the employment-population ratio from the beginning of 2008 is posted below…

2008-01-01 62.9
2008-02-01 62.8
2008-03-01 62.7
2008-04-01 62.7
2008-05-01 62.5
2008-06-01 62.4
2008-07-01 62.2
2008-08-01 62.0
2008-09-01 61.9
2008-10-01 61.7
2008-11-01 61.4
2008-12-01 61.0
2009-01-01 60.6
2009-02-01 60.3
2009-03-01 59.9
2009-04-01 59.8
2009-05-01 59.6
2009-06-01 59.4
2009-07-01 59.3
2009-08-01 59.1
2009-09-01 58.7
2009-10-01 58.5
2009-11-01 58.6
2009-12-01 58.3
2010-01-01 58.5
2010-02-01 58.5
2010-03-01 58.5
2010-04-01 58.7
2010-05-01 58.6
2010-06-01 58.5
2010-07-01 58.5
2010-08-01 58.5
2010-09-01 58.5
2010-10-01 58.3
2010-11-01 58.2
2010-12-01 58.3
2011-01-01 58.3
2011-02-01 58.4
2011-03-01 58.4
2011-04-01 58.4
2011-05-01 58.4
2011-06-01 58.2
2011-07-01 58.2
2011-08-01 58.3
2011-09-01 58.4
2011-10-01 58.4
2011-11-01 58.5
2011-12-01 58.6
2012-01-01 58.5
2012-02-01 58.6
2012-03-01 58.5
2012-04-01 58.5
2012-05-01 58.6
2012-06-01 58.6
2012-07-01 58.5
2012-08-01 58.4
2012-09-01 58.7
2012-10-01 58.7
2012-11-01 58.7
2012-12-01 58.6
2013-01-01 58.6
2013-02-01 58.6

So is there anyone out there that still wants to insist that the employment picture in the United States is getting significantly better?

Anyone that wants to claim that “unemployment is going down” should at least wait until the unemployment-population ratio gets back up to 59 percent.  Otherwise they just look foolish.

Yes, the Dow is at an all-time high right now.  But a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.

Most Americans understand that the Dow has been pumped up with all of the funny money that the Fed has been printing.  Most Americans understand that the stock market really does not accurately reflect the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.

Just consider these numbers…

-The number of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City has increased by 19 percent over the past year.

-The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been in the White House.

-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.

-Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.

No, the truth is that everything is most definitely not fine.

If everything is fine, then why did the Federal Reserve inject another 100 billion dollars into foreign banks during the last full week of February?

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are desperately trying to prop up the entire global economy.  Unfortunately, the global financial system has been built on a foundation of sand and the tide is coming in.

Back in 2008, a derivatives crisis was one of the primary causes of the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.

So did we learn our lesson?

No, the boys on Wall Street are back at it again as a recent article by Jim Armitage described…

Historically, stock markets, being driven by humans, have tended to have a similar length memory of catastrophes, before making the same dumb mistakes again.

But it hasn’t even been five years since derivatives (on that occasion based on daft mortgages) blew up the world, and yet these exotic creatures have already returned. With a vengeance.

Research from Thomson Reuters declared that banks were creating more derivatives known as asset-backed securities than at any time since before the Lehman Brothers crash. Of those, 22 percent were made up of – and forgive me the alphabet soup here – CDOs and CLOs. The very type of derivatives that exploded last time. At this stage last year, only 6 percent fell into those categories.

In other words, banks are creating more of the riskiest types of the riskiest products.

At some point, we will have another derivatives crisis even worse than the last one.

When that happens, financial markets all over the globe will crash, economic activity will grind to a standstill and unemployment will go skyrocketing once again.

But as you saw above, we have never even come close to recovering from the last crisis.

So you can believe the mind-numbing propaganda that the mainstream media is trying to feed you if you want.  Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we have not recovered from the last major economic crisis, and another one is rapidly approaching.

I hope that you are getting ready.