WITH EVERYTHING GOING ON IN THE WORLD, THIS IS “NEWS?”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jul. 5, 2017) — On Wednesday morning, CNN “New Day” hosts Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo appeared proud that their company had “tracked down” a Reddit member who reportedly “apologized” to the network for posting a GIF which was morphed into an animated video clip of President Trump wrestling a CNN reporter with the company logo covering his face.
Surprising to some observers was that the first cable news station in the country, founded in 1980 by Ted Turner and headquartered in Atlanta, GA, has apparently appointed itself as judge and jury over people’s online behavior.
Camerota, who worked for a number of years at the Fox News Channel, said on-air that it was both “remarkable” that CNN’s “investigative team” located the alleged GIF creator and that he “apologized.”
Her co-host, Cuomo, appeared dissatisfied with the apology, asking “But then why is there so much stuff in his account?”
Camerota indicated that she believes the Redditor was “genuine” in his apology despite Cuomo’s dubiousness. “It was so obvious they were hateful,” Cuomo judged of the user’s posts, which reportedly were removed.
“He had become addicted to the hate…” Camerota said. “He has a medical condition,” an on-air commentator suggested.
The alleged posts of the Redditor have not been quoted in CNN’s reporting, but the network alleges that they were “anti-Semitic” and “racist” and described as such by the user.
Camerota acknowledged that revealing the person’s name could place him in “danger,” according to the user. When Trump tweeted the animated video on Sunday, CNN commentators immediately posited that he was promoting violence against journalists.
Despite Camerota’s online pledge to “honor” CNN’s promise to protect the Redditor’s identity, Cuomo later threatened to do so on Twitter, then removed the tweet.
“It was certainly not the outcome I would have thought once we tracked him down,” CNN commentator Chris Cillizza said, joining the conversation, although noting that the White House said it did not obtain the video version of the GIF from Reddit.
“I would remind people…Donald Trump did not get this image from Reddit, so where did it come from?” Cillizza ruminated. “When exposed and identified, he then decided to apologize for multiple entries on his account,” Cuomo rejoined about the Redditor.
“A lot of people don’t apologize even when exposed,” Camerota remarked.
According to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is an attorney, CNN may have violated Georgia law by “threatening to” “(3) Disseminate any information tending to subject any person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule or to impair his credit or business repute;…”
While the hashtag #CNNBlackmail is no longer showing as trending on Twitter, it was the top trend for a good part of Wednesday after CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported on Tuesday that CNN had found the GIF creator, interviewed him, received an apology from him, and promised to withhold his name from public dissemination with the caveat that “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity” if the Redditor broke his promise of “not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.”
According to Ben Smith of Buzzfeed News, who used to employ Kaczynski, his former employee might have “outed the wrong guy.” based on differences Buzzfeed found in the original GIF and the video Trump tweeted on Sunday.
Earlier on Wednesday, Smith appeared to defend Kaczynski as “among the most careful, transparent reporters on the internet. He’s never operated with the bad faith of ppl attacking him today.”
As Cillizza noted, the White House has said that it did not obtain the video clip from Reddit.
With the threat of an attack on the U.S. from North Korea as evidenced by its firing on Tuesday of an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) as confirmed by “U.S. officials,” the threat of Islamic terrorism throughout the world, the killing in cold blood of a New York City police officer on Wednesday morning, and, as one commenter noted, CNN’s ignoring of the findings of at least three experienced investigators that the long-form birth certificate image posted on the White House website said to belong to Barack Hussein Obama is a forgery, where do CNN’s priorities lie?
