CNSNews.com’s Jonathan Mizrahi lets more false Trump White House stenography go unchallenged in an Aug. 1 article:
In a press briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that, “while we certainly support freedom of the press, we also support freedom of speech, and we think that those things go hand in hand.”
On Tuesday night, CNN reporter Jim Acosta was heckled by Trump supporters at the president’s rally in Tampa Bay, Fla., chanting things such as “fake news” and “CNN sucks.”
“When it comes to the media, the president does think that the media holds a responsibility,” Sanders said in response to a question about the treatment of Acosta. “We fully support a free press, but there also comes a high level of responsibility with that.”
Sanders continued to explain that the media has reported classified information that has been harmful to the United States on numerous occasions, citing an instance when it was reported that the United States was able to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late 90’s, reporting that ultimately caused the loss of valuable intelligence.
In fact, as the Washington Post explained, the claim that the U.S. was monitoring bin Laden’s satellite phone had been reported in the media as early as 1996 — well before a 1998 Washington Times article that Sanders and others have blamed as the “leak” that purportedly stopped bin Laden’s use of his satellite phone — meaning the information was already in the public domain. Needless to say, (Sanders did not mention that the “the media” she’s attacking over this supposed leak is a right-leaning newspaper.) It’s more likely that bin Laden stopped using the phone as a reaction to a 1998 U.S. cruise missile attack on his traning camps.
Meanwhile, over at the Washington Times, highly biased pro-Trump writer Ronald Kessler offered his own spin, blaming a Washington Post story that ran four days before the Times story did and citing anonymous “CIA officials” as supporting the claim that the article caused bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone. Kessler didn’t specifically contradict any of the claims the Post made, instead insisting that Sanders’ claim was “accurate.”
This is just the latest example of CNS putting pro-Trump stenography before basic journalistic functions like fact-checking.