CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman had a certain spin he wanted to push in an Aug. 20 article on the arrest of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon:
Former Counselor to the President Steve Bannon — who was fired by President Trump in August 2017 — was charged today, along with three other people, for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors through an “online crowdfunding campaign known as ‘We Build the Wall’ that raised more than $25 million,” said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in a press release.
[…]Bannon served at the White House from Jan. 20, 2017 to Aug. 18, 2017.
In a statement on Aug. 18, 2017, then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day.”
The New York Times reported that same day, “Mr. Trump had recently grown weary of Mr. Bannon, complaining to other advisers that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking information to reporters and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes. The situation had become untenable long before Friday, according to advisers close to Mr. Trump who had been urging the president to remove Mr. Bannon; in turn, people close to Mr. Bannon also were urging him to step down.”
While Chapman was eager to disassociate Bannon from Trump, he hid the full extent of their association: Bannon was the CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign before advising Trump in the White House. As we documented, CNS appeared to be following the White House’s orders in throwing Bannon under the bus in early 2018 after it was reported that he cooperated with a book critical of Trump.
Chapman also failed to tell his reader that the “news” operation he manages promoted the apparently fraudulent wall campaign Bannon worked for. In an May 2019 article, Craig Bannister touted how the organization “has built the country’s first border wall on private land” and “was founded by a veteran and is dependent on private donations to fund its wall construction projects.” The veteran is Brian Kolfage, who also faces fraud charges.
And in a July 2019 article, Bannister parroted a call from his boss, the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell, demanding that Facebook “live up to its own standards when it comes to standing up to violent and extremist groups like Antifa.” Among the “conservative leaders” Bannister quoted was WorldNetDaily’s David Kupelian, who complained that Facebook “shut down two Facebook pages managed by triple-amputee Iraq War vet Brian Kolfage.” In fact, Facebook took down Kolfage’s pages as part of the removal of hundreds of pages believed to be fake accounts designed to drive traffic to related websites.
Chapman’s article was simply more pro-Trump damage control by a “news” organization that’s already quite familiar with that kind of work.