It seems that CNSNews.com’s longstanding refusal to fact-check the Trump administration comes straight from the top. Managing editor Michael W. Chapman uncritically writes in a Feb. 15 article:
During his Rose Garden talk today about declaring a national emergency to deal with the crisis at the southern border, President Donald Trump discussed the scourge of drug dealers and quoted Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping who had told him that China uses the death penalty against narcotics dealers and that ends the problem.
Trump prefaced these remarks by noting that China had agreed to put the deadly drug fentanyl (synthetic opioid) on its list of illegal products.
In his speech, Trump said, “Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called ‘how about a fine?’ And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? ‘No, no, no.’”
“I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem?” asked Trump.
“‘No, we don’t have a drug problem,'” he quoted Xi as saying. “I said why? ‘Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs, end of problem.’”
That’s simply not true. China does, in fact, have a drug problem in both manufacture and use. Indeed, an actual news outlet found that the number of drug users in China is on the increase, and that the death penalty for dealers has not served as much of a deterrent, if it is at all (never mind the fact that punishing drug crimes with execution violates international law).
Asa a result of Chapman’s refusal to fact-check Trump, CNS has published more misinformation. Apparently, he’s proud to do so.