09/09/2017 / By JD Heyes
For a while, just about every “mainstream” media outlet that has a news bureau in Washington, D.C., was reporting one “bombshell” after another regarding allegations that President Donald J. Trump’s campaign “colluded” with the Russians to “steal” the election from Hillary Clinton. Even Clinton thinks so, as “the Russians” were on her long list of people, places, and things to blame for her loss.
But closer scrutiny of all those stories found that no such collusion existed, yet that isn’t stopping outlets from continuing to push the bogus narrative.
The latest news organization to do so is NBC News, which relied on an anonymous source (surprise!) for a “bombshell” that turned out to be yet another huge dud.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the network hyped what it called a “potential bombshell” last week during published and broadcast reports under this original headline: “Manafort Notes From Russian Meet Contain Cryptic Reference to ‘Donations.’” Manafort, of course, is Paul Manafort, a businessman who was briefly Trump’s campaign manager; he resigned from his post in August 2016.
The story went on to claim that Manafort’s notes from the now-infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between him, Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer included the word “donations” near a reference to the Republican National Committee.
However, as The Daily Caller notes:
NBC began walking back the “potential bombshell” almost immediately, issuing a correction the same day noting that the word “donation” didn’t actually appear in the notes, but quoting one source who said the word “donor” was in the notes.
When these mainstream media news folks are going to figure out they’re getting played, and played well, by the Deep State, is anyone’s guess, but I digress.
That said, the network’s corrected story also was incorrect. Politico reports that the word “donor” never appeared anywhere in Manafort’s notes. And what’s more, his notes “are not seen as damaging to the Trump family or campaign officials,” the news site reported further, citing a number of sources have seen the notes. NBC, meanwhile, merely relied on “two sources briefed on the evidence” for its ‘bombshell.’
Quite a difference.
Before Politico completely shut down the network’s BS story, its decision to publish the claims in the first place came in for criticism. The next day after NBC News published its story, Erik Wemple of The Washington Post hammered it for its blatant inaccuracies, saying it “provides only fodder for innuendo and conspiracy, not for sound conclusions about what happened.”
Wemple should know; his own paper was literally the first one after Trump’s big win in November to publish a massive fake Russian collusion story that relied on a dubious “source” to claim that “hundreds” of “alternative news” sites were used as Russian propaganda organs. The Post’s editors eventually published a sort-of, kind-of mea culpa, admitting that they could not confirm the dubious source. (Related: Washington Post has gone ‘full conspiracy,’ claiming any other media that tells the truth is working for the Kremlin.)
In any event, the point is the NBC News fiasco is only the latest ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ story to completely fall apart, as The Daily Caller reminds us:
CNN was forced to rewrite a story in June that claimed that former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony would refute President Trump’s assertion that Comey reassured him three times that he was not under investigation. In fact, Comey confirmed Trump’s account.
CNN, of course, is the king of fake Trump news. The network also had to completely retract an “investigative” story claiming that Trump campaign advisor Anthony Scarmucci was being probed by congressional investigators in relation to the Legislative Branch’s effort to find out if the collusion narrative is true. “The botched story turned into a public relations nightmare for CNN, and three of the networks’ employees ended up resigning,” The Daily Caller reported.
And let’s not forget The New York Times. The Old Gray Lady is guilty of publishing fake Trump-Russia collusion stories as well. Even former FBI Director James Comey called one of the paper’s stories “almost entirely wrong.”
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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Tagged Under: fake news, NBC News, President Trump, Russian collusion, Trump campaign