Always work on your weak points.
CNN's is throwing something new at people who have tried to portray it as a purveyor of so-called “fake news.”
In what may be one of the most distinctive and unorthodox promotional campaigns from the Time Warner cable-news outlet since Ted Turner launched it in 1980, CNN will push back against the portrayal by critics and members of the Trump administration that it dispenses made-up stories to the public in deliberate fashion. A new branding campaign gives the network a new slogan: “Facts First.”
At a time when President Trump and his representatives have been caught in many instances of giving out inaccurate information and details, “CNN has never been more relevant than we are now,” says Allison Gollust, CNN Worldwide’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, in an interview. “There’s a conversation happening around journalism and media and the First Amendment,” she says. “It’s happening right now. We felt compelled to participate in that conversation with a brand campaign that reminds people who we are and what we do and why we do it.”
Compelled is definetly the right word.
Where else would you go to get fact-based investigative reporting like, "Is President Trump Afraid of Stairs"? Not to mention its own major fake news scandal.
In April, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post’s words, at “the forefront of the New York Times’s reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.” It was “an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”. It didn’t take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.
Lichtblau has resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.
"Eric will guide our coverage and thinking," Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted. "And when he’s onto a investigation, he’ll still be reporting and writing too.”
Not for long. And Haris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.
And this is CNN journalism.
“Comey expected to refute Trump," was the headline. The headline didn’t hold up. An awkward correction was appended conceding that its premise had been discredited by Comey’s testimony.
The sources were, as usual, anonymous. The Fake News story was full of "a source tells CNN" and "another source said" attributions. Seventeen of them.
The hodgepodge of anonymous sources read like a bizarre fairy tale or mystery novel.
Was "the source said" the first anonymous source? Was "a source adds" the second anonymous source? Or a third anonymous source? Was "a source" the same as "one source" who claimed to be “familiar” with Comey's thinking?
"This source" seemed to be different than "one source." But what about "another source"? And the "sources"?
This wasn’t journalism, it was gibberish.
And, oh yes.
As CNN supervising producer John Bonifield admitted in a Project Veritas video, it was about the ratings.
“It’s mostly b___t right now,” he conceded.
There's a slogan if CNN wants it.