Are NBC and CNN Paying Off Top Spies Who Leaked Info With On-Air Jobs?

The Tablet  . . . Guess what? Comey’s briefing was the news hook.

"Proof of the set-up is found in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s 253-page-long Report on Russian Active Measures that was published last week. According to the report, James Clapper acknowledged “discussing the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper.” Their discussion “took place in early January 2017, around the time [intelligence community] leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump on ‘the Christopher Steele information.’ ”

"So here’s how it worked: Clapper told Comey to brief Trump on the dossier. Clapper then told Tapper that Comey had briefed Trump on the dossier. In other words, the reporting on the Steele dossier for which CNN won its award was an operation coordinated between spies and the press whose purpose was to report the existence of “compromising information” on the president-elect—information that consisted of unverified politically-funded opposition research produced by one of the CNN journalist’s former colleagues. Buzzfeed then published the dossier in its entirety—a document that prior to the briefing no press organization had been able to verify and hence had refrained from making public.

"Since then, thousands of articles on the Trump-Russia collusion story have taken CNN’s original story as the model for a new kind of American journalism, spoon-fed to a pliant digital press by cabals of political operatives and ex-spooks. Lies, innuendo, wild conspiracy theorizing, and the insistent assumption of guilt have replaced old-fashioned rules of sourcing, objectivity, and basic plausibility. While the social cost of this radical departure from these century-old norms is likely to be high, it has acquired two main forms of justification, the twin pillars of the new press." . . .

Tony Branco

The linked article to this cartoon demonstrates how the WaPo chose to discredit it along with the cartoonist.