So these days everyone calls every "news" article they don't agree with propaganda. Fox News is propaganda if you're a liberal, CNN is propaganda if you're a conservative. MSNBC and OANN may be partial exceptions since they are both called propaganda by the majority of people on both sides who can read and have any sort of reasoning skills (I kid, I kid. Kinda. ok not really).
But tonight on their website CNN has a news article, not an opinion article, but an actual news article entitled "Republican Candidates Back Trump's Election Lies", https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/06/politics/republican-candidates-trump-election-lie/index.html, which mainly talks about Trump's claims of fraud in US elections. This article is the gold standard of identifying propaganda vs. news reporting.
Credible news writers rarely use absolutes or labels to describe anything that isn't actually proven, even if it seems like a foregone conclusion. That's why they use the term "alleged" next to the name of any criminal who hasn't been convicted in court and you rarely see them use the term "lies" unless they are quoting someone else or discussing a topic that has been decided in court and was found that someone was purposely making stuff up for personal gain of some sort.
This article repeatedly calls any claims he's made about election fraud "lies" and it directly says that anyone running for office who suggests there has been any election fraud is "campaigning on Trump's election lies". A credible news organization or any writer who is writing an unbiased news article would refer to Trump's claims as "unproven claims" or they might say "Trump's claims of election fraud are unproven" or they might say "so far there has been no evidence that Trump's claims are valid". But credible, unbiased news never calls something a lie when A) they don't have proof that the person making the claim knows the claim is untrue, or B) there hasn't been a complete, detailed investigation proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the claim is false. By definition a person who says something they believe to be true isn't lying, and a claim that hasn't been proven to be completely false isn't a lie. Compare the writing style to this article with dozens of articles about Hillary Clinton from CNN where they frequently mention her "misspeaking" or saying something "that still remains unproven".
I've been clear on here I'm not a Trump fan, and I think he's his own worst enemy most of the time. But the majority of really nasty things said about Trump such as him being a racist or a fascist are actual lies -- the real kind where the person making the claim knows it's false -- created by CNN and repeated by CNN "anchors" (CNN doesn't have an actual "news" anchor on it's staff).
I don't normally take up for Trump and have no desire to meet him or even be in the same room with him, but when I read this article it struck me how it sounded like a bad high school journalism article -- one that would have likely been given a failing grade for breaking almost every journalistic rule in the book. Even if you agree with everything it says, the way it's technically written is Propaganda 101.
But tonight on their website CNN has a news article, not an opinion article, but an actual news article entitled "Republican Candidates Back Trump's Election Lies", https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/06/politics/republican-candidates-trump-election-lie/index.html, which mainly talks about Trump's claims of fraud in US elections. This article is the gold standard of identifying propaganda vs. news reporting.
Credible news writers rarely use absolutes or labels to describe anything that isn't actually proven, even if it seems like a foregone conclusion. That's why they use the term "alleged" next to the name of any criminal who hasn't been convicted in court and you rarely see them use the term "lies" unless they are quoting someone else or discussing a topic that has been decided in court and was found that someone was purposely making stuff up for personal gain of some sort.
This article repeatedly calls any claims he's made about election fraud "lies" and it directly says that anyone running for office who suggests there has been any election fraud is "campaigning on Trump's election lies". A credible news organization or any writer who is writing an unbiased news article would refer to Trump's claims as "unproven claims" or they might say "Trump's claims of election fraud are unproven" or they might say "so far there has been no evidence that Trump's claims are valid". But credible, unbiased news never calls something a lie when A) they don't have proof that the person making the claim knows the claim is untrue, or B) there hasn't been a complete, detailed investigation proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the claim is false. By definition a person who says something they believe to be true isn't lying, and a claim that hasn't been proven to be completely false isn't a lie. Compare the writing style to this article with dozens of articles about Hillary Clinton from CNN where they frequently mention her "misspeaking" or saying something "that still remains unproven".
I've been clear on here I'm not a Trump fan, and I think he's his own worst enemy most of the time. But the majority of really nasty things said about Trump such as him being a racist or a fascist are actual lies -- the real kind where the person making the claim knows it's false -- created by CNN and repeated by CNN "anchors" (CNN doesn't have an actual "news" anchor on it's staff).
I don't normally take up for Trump and have no desire to meet him or even be in the same room with him, but when I read this article it struck me how it sounded like a bad high school journalism article -- one that would have likely been given a failing grade for breaking almost every journalistic rule in the book. Even if you agree with everything it says, the way it's technically written is Propaganda 101.
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