Brian C. Joondeph "Mark Twain, author of the now politically incorrect Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, once said, “If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” Good advice, especially for those who play fast and loose with facts and truth. And relevant in the internet age when articles, headlines, words and photos are preserved in perpetuity.
"Lies, built upon lies, eventually become so tangled that the truth may be forever lost down the rabbit hole. Rather than starting with the truth, to avoid having to remember the labyrinthine path taken by each additional falsehood.
"CNN, the network famously referred to by President Trump as “fake news”, should heed the advice of Mark Twain. Otherwise they are likely to be tripped up over their own contradictory stories, in this case only a few years apart.
I"n 2015, CNN ran a story with the headline, “Did climate change cause California drought?” Less than two years later, CNN ran this headline, “California’s drought is almost over.” Is the irony of these two headlines lost on the journalistic mavens of CNN? Probably. But the internet remembers, happy to take CNN to task over their contradictions." . . .
After all, CNN totally missed the humor in a Sean Spicer quip during a recent White House press briefing. In response to reporters pestering him about mythical Trump-Russian collusion, Spicer responded, "If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that's a Russia connection." CNN, missing Spicer’s joke just as they missed the irony of climate change causing then somehow stopping a drought, ran a fact checking story to tell us that Russian dressing isn’t really Russian. Thanks, intrepid journalists. Did CNN ever fact check Barack Obama’s claim to have campaigned in 57 states with a news report telling us that there aren’t really 57 states?