CNN Made Me Go Through a Fact-Check Once... They Don't Seem to Do That Anymore
Since taking a harder left turn, they appear to have dropped the practice.
Almost three years ago, CNN ran a column I wrote on their opinion site, CNN Opinion, titled “Democrats are in danger of going too far left for 2018”. It was and still is the biggest mainstream platform to feature something I had written.
In writing for RedState, we go through the editing process, provide plenty of links as sources to back up what we write. The fact-checking is on us, the writers, to make sure we make ourselves and the site appear as credible as possible. Sometimes it works, and sometimes we mess up. Recently, we’ve done a lot to overhaul the process, making sure more pieces get reviewed and are backed up. In response to the site’s growth over the past couple of years, a lot of people have been gunning for RedState, hoping to take it down a notch.
Writing one column for CNN, however, was a much more vigorous process. The editor of the opinion side was my primary point of contact, and I had to submit to him. He would then send it to their copy-editor and fact-checker, who would ask questions and make suggestions, then they’d send it back to me. I would have to change or justify what I wrote if the opinion was something that needed to be backed up. I won a couple of battles and lost a couple of others (minor stuff, really - for example, I had to use a CNN poll as a source instead of a YouGov poll, which makes sense because online polling is still largely inaccurate and unproven, but it did somewhat change how I approached the overall topic).
In the end, though, I was proud of what was submitted. It did not win me any fans in CNN’s audience, which I expected, and there were some folks on Twitter with big followings that absolutely hated it, but sometimes you just gotta feed on the hate.
Not too long after that, I was asked to write something non-political for Washington Examiner Magazine. It was about a professional wrestling movie, and once again I was fact-checked fairly thoroughly. I have a friend at the Examiner, and I know they still fact-check every piece that gets submitted.
Most major platforms copy-edit and fact-check for sourcing, clarity, and generally to make sure something foolish doesn’t slip through. The places that don’t do this, both left and right, are simply not reputable. CNN has fact-checking prominently featured in their political coverage, and while I know what I submitted in 2018 was an opinion, you would think that the news side would take fact-checking way more seriously. That makes this particular story (and several of their stories in general) just very disappointing. The opening two paragraphs are dripping with disdain and belong in the opinion section of CNN, not the news and “analysis” side.
With its cultish devotion to Donald Trump, the majority of the Republican Party is choosing a wannabe-autocrat over the political system that made the United States the world's most powerful nation and its dominant democracy.
The ex-President is showing that he doesn't have to be in the Oval Office to damage faith in US elections and to trash truth, as his movement based on lies and personal homage takes an increasingly firm grip of the Republican Party. The widespread mistrust he continues to foster in the fairness of the US political system among millions of voters poses grave risks to democracy itself.
And this line in particular is really questionable.
A slew of Republican state legislatures have passed laws making it more difficult for Democrats, and especially Black voters, to cast ballots.
A few caveats here: I don’t disagree with a lot of the assertions about Trump. I am not a fan, and I really think he has done at least as much damage to the trust Americans have in the election process as the Democrats did in the aftermath of the 2016 election. All of that said, though, that is an opinion and decidedly not news and analysis. It completely undermines the goal of journalism to label it as such.
That line about making it “more difficult for Democrats, and especially Black voters, to cast ballots” is made up. Multiple fact-checks have confirmed several of the critics’ assertions about the Georgia voting law, in particular, are at best misleading. Many of the new laws winding their way through other state legislatures are based on that Georgia law, which would suggest the assertion in the CNN “analysis” piece is not entirely accurate.
The piece is also drawing heavily on the really unproven idea that Donald Trump will have a major role in the GOP going forward. He has been effectively silenced by social media, his media appearances are few and far between, and in places outside of the east coast bubbles, Trump is not a major factor in political conversations. CNN, like so many other places, are trying to keep Trump in news cycles, when it is becoming more and more obvious that the electorate is, as it always has been, an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality when it comes to political figures. Trump is not the center of most conversations. Most people are focused on what President Joe Biden is doing, but that makes the current administration’s flaws glaringly obvious, and its supporters in these outlets do anything they can to keep the focus on Trump.
I just don’t think it’s working for them, and I don’t think that they’ll be able to keep it up much longer. You see Republicans moving on in many ways. Well, the Republicans who aren’t busy being loudly anti-Trump. The Liz Cheneys and the Mitt Romneys of the GOP are still relying on Trump’s specter to stay “respected” by the media and the Democrats, neither of whom have any actual love for them because they are Republican.
CNN claims its job is news. It claims it is meant to analyze what’s going on in the world around us. But it is so focused on building a narrative and agenda based largely in their own wish-casting and opinion that the real news and analysis is disappearing.