CNN is having a very bad week...

Project Veritas. 

I'm going to skip the normal format for this one. It's been a very entertaining couple of days if you happen to dislike CNN. CNN, once the most respected cable news networks, has lost quite a bit of credibility in the past couple of years due to publishing stupid stories and being incredibly biased against President Donald Trump. Well now the chickens are coming home to roost and they are paying the price. 

First, CNN published a story that claimed a senior Trump adviser, Anthony Scaramucci, was in contact with the Russians and that there as an open investigation into him and President Trump. That story appears to have been completely false and it resulted in a retraction and the resignation of the author of the story and two editors.  

The incident confirms what a lot of us already knew about the news media. They rush stuff out without vetting the sources and when it blows up in their face they print out a retraction that nobody reads. This time though the story was false enough and only based on one anonymous source (Breitbart says it was someone on Elizabeth Warren's staff) that heads actually rolled for it. 

But this is not the only time CNN has been completely wrong. Remember this headline? 

That article, which I won't link too because I don't want CNN to get any money, stated that former FBI director James Comey was going to say that Trump lied about Comey telling him that he wasn't under investigation. How did that work out? It didn't. 

All of this has hurt CNN's credibility badly. But it's not over yet. James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas media company has gotten hidden camera footage of on of CNN's producers saying, well, some pretty damning things. And it is just part one of a series of videos that will continue. Watch for yourself below. 

Though James O'Keefe has his own problems with legitimacy, most notably his constant overselling of the footage he has, the hidden camera footage is hard to argue against. The producer, John Bonifield is in the health section of CNN, but confirmed what a lot of us thought about CNN's constant coverage of the Russia conspiracy theory. 

It's all about ratings. In his own words Bonifield said that the story is mostly bullshit, but that CNN covers it because it makes them money. They drop coverage of other important stories, such as the Paris Climate Accord, because their audience is mostly far left liberals who want to see President Trump impeached. 

So they cover the story that will get Trump haters to watch, even if it means that they have to use crappy sources and put out fake news to do so. That is not what journalism is supposed to be. Ideally the media would cover things objectively and rely less on anonymous sources. But since the media is profit driven they only pay lip service to journalist efforts. 

Finally, I have to say that I watched the 1976 classic Network this weekend for the first time. If you haven't seen it, it's the story of a nightly newscast that gave up on reporting the news after their anchorman loses his mind and starts ranting and raving. The network then gets involved with terrorists and goes so far (spoiler warning), to have those terrorists murder the anchorman after his ratings tank. 

Everything I just wrote could apply to CNN today. Even the part about having connections to terrorists. After all, their New Years Eve Host, Kathy Griffen did her best ISIS impression holding up the decapitated head of President Trump. The whole time I was watching the movie I was thinking to myself, "This is CNN"...

For all those reasons and more I have stopped using CNN as a source here and I have completely stopped watching the channel. I do that even as I have cut back on using other sources, such as The Washington Post and the New York Times, who, while biased, still attempt to have some standards. They may have incredible bias, but CNN has even passed outlets like Salon or Daily Kos in terms of their coverage.  I encourage everyone that is reading this to do what I have done and completely cut them out of your life.. As the president said, they are the very definition of Fake News. Don't give them money...