Mr. Morden
Atlas Legend
Posts: 44,066
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« on: January 12, 2017, 02:17:40 PM » |
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Trump’s “fake news” charge seems to be conflating two separate questions: 1) Is there a dossier alleging that Russia is holding blackmail material over Trump, which also describes what the alleged Trump indiscretions are, for which the intel chiefs provided a summary to Trump and Obama last week? 2) Are the allegations in the dossier true?
What CNN and other news orgs reported a few days ago was #1. They said that yes, there is such a dossier, which the intel chiefs at least thought was worth sharing a summary with Trump, for whatever reason. This isn’t fake news. The statement by Clapper, plus the statement by McCain, plus Trump’s own comments on the matter would seem to confirm that there is such a dossier whose contents were shared with Trump by the intel chiefs. That hardly seems in dispute at this point.
But what about #2, are the allegations in the dossier true? Neither CNN nor any of the other MSM outlets said that they were true. They don’t know if they were true, and they said as much. Yet Trump lumps it all together, implying that CNN was claiming that they were true, and thus brands CNN “fake news”.
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