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How CNN’s Fake News Machine Ran Conspiracy theories, anonymous sources and big lies. June 28, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

In April, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post’s words, at “the forefront of the New York Times’s reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.” It was “an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”. It didn’t take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.

Lichtblau has resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.

“Eric will guide our coverage and thinking,” Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted. “And when he’s onto a investigation, he’ll still be reporting and writing too.”

Not for long. And Haris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.

CNN Investigates had been announced after President Trump’s inauguration. Its hit pieces had followed the same pattern as the Scaramucci attack that would be its undoing. Go after a personality tipped for a job with the new administration. CNN Investigates had previously targeted Monica Crowley and Sheriff Clarke with plagiarism accusations. But this time around, CNN’s anti-Trump unit had made a big mistake.

Unlike K-File’s petty harassment of Trump associates, the Scaramucci hit piece came from the heavier hitters poached by CNN from mainstream media papers who were supposed to bring down Trump.

The men behind the disaster were no lightweights. Thomas Frank had been nominated for a Pulitzer. Eric Lichtblau had shared a Pulitzer for bashing the Bush administration over, of all things, surveillance. Their names were all over CNN hit pieces tying to tie Trump to an impeachable Russian scandal.

That was what they had been hired for.

CNN claimed that Lichtblau had been “reporting on Comey for more than a decade.” And Frank was busy rolling out fresh grist for the Trump-Russia mill. One Frank article on CNN breathlessly claimed, “One week, three more Trump-Russia connections.” CNN was riding the impeachment train to Moscow.

And yet Lichtblau’s tenure at CNN quickly became troubled. An early June piece denied that Comey had told President Trump that he was not under investigation.

“Comey expected to refute Trump,” was the headline. The headline didn’t hold up. An awkward correction was appended conceding that its premise had been discredited by Comey’s testimony.

The sources were, as usual, anonymous. The Fake News story was full of “a source tells CNN” and “another source said” attributions. Seventeen of them.

The hodgepodge of anonymous sources read like a bizarre fairy tale or mystery novel.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Balfour Declaration Was More than the Promise of One Nation By affirming the right of any Jew to call Palestine home, it also changed the international status of the Jewish people.Martin Kramer ****

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

In 1930, the British Colonial Office published a “white paper” that Zionists saw as a retreat from the Balfour Declaration. David Lloyd George, whose government had issued the declaration in 1917, was long out of office and now in the twilight of his political career. In an indignant speech, he insisted that his own country had no authority to downgrade the declaration, because it constituted a commitment made by all of the Allies in the Great War:

In wartime we were anxious to secure the good will of the Jewish community throughout the world for the Allied cause. The Balfour Declaration was a gesture not merely on our part but on the part of the Allies to secure that valuable support. It was prepared after much consideration, not merely of its policy, but of its actual wording, by the representatives of all the Allied and associated countries including America, and of our dominion premiers.

There was some exaggeration here; not all of the Allies shared the same understanding of the policy or saw the “actual wording.” But Lloyd George pointed to the forgotten truth that I sought to resurrect through my essay. In 1917, there was not yet a League of Nations or a United Nations. But, in the consensus of the Allies, there was the nucleus of a modern international order. The Balfour Declaration had the weight of this consensus behind it, beforeBalfour signed it. This international buy-in is also why the Balfour Declaration entered the mandate for Palestine, entrusted to Britain by the League of Nations. Those who now cast the Balfour Declaration as an egregious case of imperial self-dealing simply don’t know its history (or prefer not to know it).

Nicholas Rostowdoes know it, and we should be grateful for the efforts he has made to inform wider audiences about the legal foundations of Israel. “It is not just that ignorance of the past can lead to unnecessary policy error,” he writes. “As we know all too well from UN resolutions and opinions of the International Court of Justice, such oblivion, willed or not, can and in this case emphatically does lead to gross injustice.”

Of course, some of this ignorance and oblivion is indeed deliberate. Consider the way in which Britain “forgot” its own understanding of the Balfour Declaration. In 1922, an earlier British “white paper” interpreted the declaration in light of postwar conditions. Its key determination was that the Jewish people “should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on the sufferance.” The mandate then interpreted the declaration to mean that the country’s nationality law should be “framed so as to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine.”

The Balfour Declaration may or may not have implied a Jewish state, but by affirming the right of any Jew to call Palestine home, it changed the status of the Jewish people. There was one small spot on the globe in which Jews had a natural right to take up abode, by virtue of their “historic connection.” (The Balfour Declaration thus anticipated Israel’s own “Law of Return” of 1950, guaranteeing that “every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.”)

In issuing yet another “white paper” in 1939, the British took theopposite position. That document stipulated that after a five-year period of reduced immigration, “no further Jewish immigration will be permitted unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.” The Jewish right had disappeared; Jews would henceforth be in Palestine on (Arab) sufferance.

The British justification? Between 1922 and 1939, the British had admitted 300,000 Jews to Palestine, and Jews now formed a third of the population. Wasn’t that enough?

At that time, there were 9.7 million Jews in Europe. Six years later, six million of them were dead, and even then the British were determined to keep the remnant out of Palestine. They reasoned that if the Jewish proportion was held to a third of the population, the Jews would never be able to found a state. And so the British “forgot” their own determination of 1922, that the Jewish people was in Palestine “as of right.”

In the end, a third of Palestine’s population, comprising 600,000 determined Jews, was enough to found Israel even in the teeth of pan-Arab opposition and British hostility. The act of reminding, with which Rostow credits me, should be commended to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been invited to London by Theresa May, the British prime minister, to “mark” the Balfour centennial. Netanyahu should be sure to link the history of 1917 to that of 1939. The former is a noble chapter; the latter, a shameful one.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tony Thomas : Surely You’re Crying, Mr Feynman

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

Back in 1974, the US physicist and polymath warned graduating students of ‘cargo cult science’ and the careerist urge to confirm the flawed orthodoxy of earlier and inaccurate results. Climate “science” was then in its infancy but the trajectory of its corruption has confirmed all his worst fears.

The trouble with mainstream climate scientists is that they’re third-rate scientists, and the reason they’re third-rate is that they’re dishonest. My authority for this statement is physicist Richard Feynman (picturd), who has been dead for 29 years but was ranked by his peers as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time. Feynman set out the parameters for honest science in general, and I’ve never yet seen a mainstream climate scientist live up to Feynman’s honesty test.

In 2015 I was transiting through Los Angeles airport and killing time in a bookshop. I bought Feynman’s paperback Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! because it seemed unusual for physicists to take pride in being funny.

In the book’s first essay he tells how, as a small kid, he earned pocket-money repairing people’s radios. A customer would tell him about a fault, and that would be enough to diagnose the problem without even turning on the set.

The book’s final essay – in between there’s wonderful entertainment – is called “Cargo Cult Science”. It’s the commencement address he gave to freshers at Caltech in 1974. The original cargo cults, as you probably know, involved post-war tribesmen in PNG building mock airstrips and control towers in the hope that this would attract US cargo planes to again deliver their cargoes of desirable goods. “They follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land,” Feynman told the students. He went on to talk about what is missing in bad science – honesty.

“It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

“In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. [Climate science is intrinsically not experimental but its modelling can now be checked against reality]. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.

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CHRIS MATTHEWS: ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

https://pjmedia.com/video/chris-matthews-trumps-comments-dont-make-any-coherence/

Chris Matthews attempted to make fun of President Trump’s nonsensical sentences, and instead said something a grammar teacher would give a demerit for. Matthews said, “His comments don’t make any coherence. They never make any coherence since he’s been President.” He could have said ‘his comments don’t make any sense,’ or ‘his comments aren’t coherent,’ but he didn’t. Oh the irony!

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Black Unemployment at Lowest Rate in 17 Years By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

In the months since Donald Trump became America’s 45th president, the unemployment rate among black people has hit the lowest number since 2000.

In February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the black unemployment rate at 8.1, but the number dropped to 8.0 in March, 7.9 in April, and 7.5 in May.

During most of Barack Obama’s presidency, black unemployment was in double digits, hitting a high mark of 16.8 in March 2010. Between July 2008 (during the financial crisis) and February 2015, the rate remained above 10 percent.

Black unemployment has not been this low since December 2000, when 7.4 percent of African-Americans looking for work were unable to find it.

This good news should be taken with a grain of salt, however, because the workforce participation rate remained low in May, at 62.7 percent. It is possible that many people stopped looking for work, just as others found good jobs.

Some might argue that Obama could be credited for this drop in unemployment. But under that logic, Bill Clinton is responsible for the increase in black unemployment in the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Even so, this decline in the black unemployment rate is good news for the new president during his first year in office.

This comes on the heels of a Los Angeles Times report that President Trump has been a unique champion of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

“For [President] Obama, people expected him to come in and fix everything — especially for black people,” Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, told the L.A. Times. “But he never campaigned strongly for HBCUs.”

But Trump came into office with no expectations, and has pleasantly surprised black leaders like Kimbrough. “He’s coming in saying he’s going to be the president for HBCUs,” the university president noted.

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Al-Shabaab Complains About ‘Fake News,’ Anonymous Sourcing Terror group makes case for Sharia-compliant journalism after couple who left Shabaab tell all. By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

Al-Shabaab issued a lengthy slam against a report that the group decried as fake news, laying out a Sharia case against using anonymous sourcing and trying to shore up their defense with a list of terror leaders who think they’re great.

The terror group is taking issue with “Why My Wife and I Left Shabab in Somalia,” a two-part Skype interview featuring two Europeans, unnamed and with their faces covered and voices altered, who described life with the terror group and their imprisonment upon attempting to flee Al-Shabaab. The interviews were posted by New Yorker Bilal Abdul Kareem, who runs a video channel called On the Ground News.

Shabaab expresses “dismay” that the lengthy interviews were “nothing more than unsubstantiated allegations and sweeping statements that sought to delegitimize the Mujahideen of East Africa by portraying them as an oppressive band of crooks and criminals,” and accused “brother Bilal” of deviation from “the expected journalistic integrity and Islamic etiquettes required from a Muslim reporter.”

In a document penned earlier this month by Abu Muhammad Al-Muhajir — he says he came from another country and has fought with Al-Shabaab for nearly a decade — and distributed online by al-Qaeda’s Global Islamic Media Front, the group then lays out what they believe to be those journalistic standards.

“Entertaining allegations and presenting them as facts without double-checking their veracity is something unjustified, both from a Shari’ah as well as from a journalistic perspective,” the document states, accusing the video site of giving the couple “a platform to spread a one-sided, gloomy depiction of the Jihad in East Africa.”

Al-Shabaab’s second piece of advice says it’s against Islamic law to use anonymous or obscured sourcing.

“Of course, one might argue that hiding their identities was done out of concern for their safety. The rules, however, are binding considering the harmful effects of accepting disparaging testimonies from anonymous sources,” Al-Muhajir writes.

“For argument’s sake, even if the identities of these individuals were known to the reporter, then that still would not justify accepting their version of events to be true without verifying them, for that would be great injustice and bias,” the document continues. “Furthermore, it is imperative to ask ourselves, is the disparagement of these two unknown individuals enough to discredit an established Jihadi organization that has been recognized, recommended and respected by the senior leadership of all the Jihadi groups worldwide?”

“This is a group that has been praised by the likes of Shaikh Osama ibn Laden, Shaikh Abu Basir Nasir Al-Wuhayshi, Shaikh Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, Shaikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Shaikh Abu Yahya Al-Libi, Shaikh Anwar Al-Awlaki, Shaikh Mustafa Abu Yazid, Shaikh Ayman Ad-Dhawahiri and others. Is it therefore logical or acceptable from a Shari’ah standpoint, for brother Bilal to cast away the praise and recommendations of such revered Islamic leaders based on the accusations of two anonymous individuals?”

Al-Muhajir also questioned whether the couple were “coerced by the apostate intelligence agencies” after leaving Al-Shabaab and whether they were part of a “new media strategy” against jihadists.

“Taking into consideration the gravity of the allegations and the damaging consequences they may cause, it would have been befitting for brother Bilal to carefully scrutinize the profile of Abdurahman ‘Doe’ and Saffiyah ‘Doe’ to know whether these anonymous individuals were trustworthy sources of information before disseminating their narratives to the world as facts,” the document adds.

Later on, the author admits that Al-Shabaab, as in “every Jihadi arena,” acknowledges “mistakes which have occurred and will continue to occur because error is something innate in human nature,” but insists mistakes — “if we were to hypothetically say that innocent people were killed during some of [Al-Shabaab’s] military operations” — don’t “render their Jihad illegitimate.”

The group claims that the couple were detained because the terror organization was trying to find a safe route by which they could go home. Al-Muhajir then complains that the couple didn’t talk about crimes against Muslims by “Crusaders” during their hourlong interview, “as if the couples’ personal dilemma is more important than the greater struggle” of jihad.

“In Islam, there is absolutely no room for entertaining unfounded accusations and merely claiming that ‘everyone knows’ will never hold water in the court of Shari’ah,” adds the rebuttal.CONTINUE AT SITE

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Beguiled and The Big Sick By Marion DS Dreyfus

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

Happily, the audience for the delicate, moody-erotic The Beguiled is not that lowest common denominator so often seen at the Biff-Bam school of entertainment, where special effects rule.

The Sofia Coppola-directed historical drama is rich with atmosphere, with photographic meditations frequently invoked through the sultry, tenebrous Spanish moss-draped Southern landscapes, wild grasses and brambles, figurative representations of the subcutaneous emotions of the seven young boarding school charges of Nicole Kidman’s governess, Martha Farnsworth, in bucolic Virginia during the late Civil War.

With several murkier films under her directorial belt, Coppola just became only the second woman in film history to take the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director prize.

The toothsome found enemy, a Union soldier with a broken leg, played by the sinewy Colin Farrell, lying in favored state, is attended to by the bevy of boarding school beauties sequestered as the war proceeds within actual earshot, just miles away. We hear the muffled booms of the cannon from afar.

How the houseful of lissome and flirtatious young ladies succors the manipulative, perhaps dangerous but handsome soldier with his wounded leg is the tale. Each sedate but demurely aroused female demonstrates unambiguous interest in this unwonted male guest as a semi-resident in their cloistered enclave. Amusing to note their individual stratagems for dropping in on their soldier.

Farrell is, of course, the “other side,” and thus a risk, both to them and to any home-team soldiery who might come to claim him.

For all the suppressed erotic longings, it is a decorous series of weeks, furtive-innocent nighttime visits, on many pretexts, from cups of water to berries fresh picked – with period language and comportment worthy of Henry James. Coppola wrote the script from a novel penned by someone else.

Nicole Kidman starred as a governess previously in the tense Gothic ghost story The Others (2001), another film with elements of psychological horror (directed by Alejandro Amenábar) evoked by the current decorous offering.

Standouts in the cast are Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning as two of the steamy-repressed ladies in waiting under Kidman’s ministrations and tutelage.

The Big Sick, on the other hand, is the true story of how Pakistani comedian Kumail Nanjiani met his real-life wife, Emily. Aside from the misconceived and off-putting title, this is an endearing, warm-hearted, exceptional biopic with a goodly trove of laughs and insights into the often irksome life of a comic, especially one whose family is traditional Muslim – and disapproves utterly of their son’s raffish and low-esteemed career.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama’s Criminal Enterprise Collapsing By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

As former FBI Director James Comey’s best friend, Robert Mueller, stocks his Seinfeld investigation-about-nothing with every Democratic lawyer and Hillary and/or Obama donor he can find, we are treated to the delicious irony of collusion with Russia being confirmed — and the colluder-in-chief being Ex-president Barack Hussein Obama.

Even Obama’s Democrat supporters are now acknowledging he knew about Russia’s hacking of the DNC and Podesta emails. They are acknowledging that he did nothing but are not acknowledging the reason why – that he thought Hillary Clinton was going to succeed him and he wanted to do nothing to offend the Russians to whom he had once famously promised more “flexibility.”As Fox News Politics reported:

President Trump criticized his predecessor for allegedly doing “nothing” about reports that Russia interfered in last year’s presidential campaign, in a recent interview.“I just heard today for the first time that (former President) Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it,” Trump said in the interview set to air Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” “The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before the election. … If he had the information, why didn’t he do something about it?”

Even Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that President Obama’s refusal to embarrass his Russian friends by doing nothing was a mistake:

President Obama’s decision to not act sooner on Russian election interference last year was “a very serious mistake,” says California Rep. Adam Schiff.

“I think the administration needed to call out Russia earlier, and needed to act to deter and punish Russia earlier and I think that was a very serious mistake,” Schiff said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Schiff, the top ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Obama was hesitant to confront Russia over its active measures campaign for fear of being seen as helping Hillary Clinton and of fueling Donald Trump’s allegations that the election was being “rigged” against him.

That is the excuse made by those caught with their hands in the cookie jar. What happened to our democracy being at stake, the sanctity of our electoral process being violated? It was okay to jeopardize our national security through inaction as long as it was thought it might embarrass Hillary? But when Trump won, suddenly it became an issue for which he was responsible?

As noted, Obama’s collusion with the Russians began years earlier when he conspired to gut U.S. missile defense efforts in Europe. As Investor’s Business Daily noted over a year ago, President Obama had other plans and his betrayal of our allies was exquisitely ironic:

Yet within hours of Medvedev’s election as president in 2008, the Russian announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 missiles in his country’s enclave of Kaliningrad situated between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.

He wanted the U.S. to abandon plans to deploy missile interceptors in Poland and warning radars in the Czech Republic designed to counter a future threat from Iran.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson: Fancy Names for Left-Wing Anti-Semitism Commentary

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

It was a Chicago weekend filled with gay pride events, with friends and families cheering on the marchers. But a dark cloud loomed over one event. When some lesbians showed up at the “Dyke March” with banners that included a Star of David, they were booted out.

The Jewish symbol “made us feel unsafe,” the organizers said.

As the blues-rock singer Delbert McClinton once wrote, “If you can’t lie no better than that, you might as well tell the truth.”

Noxious in its own right, this incident highlights several problems that are now pervasive on the left and increasingly pollute the public sphere. They deserve exposure and censure.

There’s no mistaking the Star of David’s meaning. It’s the universal symbol for Judaism, one seen at every synagogue—and on every “Coexist” bumper sticker. It is the centerpiece of Israel’s flag, marking it as the Jewish state. It was pinned as the mark of Cain on Jews in ghettos and concentration camps.

When the organizers of Chicago’s “Dyke March” prohibited its display, they were saying, “Jews are not welcome here if they display any symbol of their faith or cultural history.”

The irony, of course, is that gays themselves were treated this way for years. They were told to keep their heads down and never say who they really are, much less display their orientation openly, proudly. They are still treated this way in many countries, the very ones embraced by the Dyke March organizers. It’s a bizarre contortion of “progressive ideology,” one they could test by marching through Ramallah or Gaza City.

The organizers were open about why they prohibited the Jewish symbol. They loathe Israel and love Palestinian opposition to it. Of course, you could hold those views and still let others march. But that wasn’t “progressive” enough for them.

Incidents like this are not confined to a few wackos. They occur regularly at leftist protests and on college campuses. For the first time since the 1950s, anti-Semitism is voiced openly, well beyond fringe groups and “restricted” country clubs.

This resurgence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has been growing in Europe for more than a decade. On the right, it’s a return to age-old hatreds in an age of globalization and dislocation. On the left, it’s a fashionable way to show solidarity with Muslim immigrants—without actually dealing with the serious (and increasingly lethal) problems of integrating them into modern European life.

Like so many bad ideas, this New Anti-Semitism jumped the pond, landing first in universities and spreading from there. On campus, the vanguard has been Muslim activists from the Middle East and North Africa, especially Palestinians, with little regard for free speech if it conflicts with their political aims. They show up to protest at virtually all pro-Israel events (okay), and routinely disrupt them (not okay).

They have many fellow travelers, as the Dyke March shows. What they share is contempt for the First Amendment. They think views that diverge from theirs should be suppressed. Of course, they alone are allowed to make those decisions.

The Dyke March incident reveals several other disturbing trends, as well. It shows how easily the disparagement of Israel, which is nearly universal on the left, spills over into denigration of all Jews.

Ah, you say, but aren’t many Jews active on the left? Yes, but too few have fought back against their comrades’ scorn of their religion or the Jewish state. Some don’t care because they are thoroughly secular. Judaism may have been their parents’ or grandparents’ religion, but it is not theirs. Others are aggressively anti-Israel. Their presence as Jews (which they highlight) gives political cover to others’ hatred. How could we be anti-Semitic if we welcome these Jews?

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s media enemies know that bashing him makes them big money but CNN’s greediness and desperation to get him has cost them dear by Piers Morgan

Posted By on June 28th, 2017

CNN’s epic mistake probably stems from lethal combination of greed and laziness. The fact is Trump bashing has led to soaring ratings and readership – and thus soaring profits.

‘CNN, the most trusted name in news,’ bellows James Earl Jones morning, noon and night during the network’s 24/7 programming.

Well, not today it isn’t.

In arguably the most humiliating moment in its history, CNN just accepted resignations from three of its top journalists over a story they got horrendously wrong about President Trump and Russia.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time for CNN, or involved a worse kind of story.

Its war with Trump has escalated on an almost daily basis since he won the presidency.

He furiously brands CNN ‘Fake News’.

CNN, in turn, mocks and berates him at every turn and devotes huge resources toward trying to expose him.

The Scaramucci story was fake news. End.

And it was a story designed to cause great damage to Trump as he battles the potentially presidency-ending allegation that he colluded with Russians.

So how did this fiasco happen?

I fear the answer probably lies in that lethal combination of commercial greed and laziness.

CNN has enjoyed soaring ratings with its relentless, mostly negative focus on Trump’s presidency. That, in turn, has led to soaring profits.

The equation is simple: Trump-bashing = $$$.

They are not the only ones to do this; from MSNBC to Stephen Colbert, there are myriad media entities and shows currently cashing in big time by whacking Trump.

But with that success comes complacency.

CNN reported this story because it was desperate to report this story.

It was proof, finally, that a key Trump ally was up to his neck in financial filth with the Russians.

‘Follow the money’ was the Watergate journalists’ mantra, and it finally got them their man.

CNN’s own versions of Bernstein and Woodward clearly thought they were doing the same.

It’s a toxic, abusive relationship that’s got so vicious and vengeful it threatens to imperil the very cornerstone of democracy, freedom of speech.

Now, CNN’s high moral ground has crumbled beneath it in spectacular style.