Many in the media are working with progressive interests to undermine and remove the president by using mass manipulation cloaked as reporting, according to five-time Emmy Award winner, author and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson.
“Transactional journalism” is clinically defined by Attkisson as “reporters making inappropriate deals with the people they’re reporting on,” the phenomenon seems more like political warfare to those with an ideological lens.
Attkisson swims in the waters she writes and speaks of as the feature of her own Sunday investigative show, “Full Measure,” and a former CBS investigative reporter.
She retells the story of Marc Ambinder in this exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. Ambinder sold his journalistic soul for an advance copy of a speech in 2009 by then Secretary of State Clinton’s staff.
The self-admitted, left-leaning “journolist” member propagated the description of Clinton’s speech across mainstream media to manipulate public opinion in accordance with the elites’ dictates.
Attkisson, while seeing offenders on both sides, admits that part of what she describes has been “rooted in an ideological motive to unseat candidate Trump, and now to try to harm President Trump. News organizations have admitted to such,” she says.
Media entities she has admired, such as the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, have suspended their journalistic rules, and made excessive reporting mistakes and errors, because they have decided President Donald Trump is antithetical to their beliefs.
Using emails exposed from FOIA requests or the WikiLeaks dump of emails leaked in 2016, Attkisson’s new New York Times bestseller, called “The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What you See, What you Think and How You Vote,” is a damning indictment of the media.
Attkisson believes many mainstream news organizations, had they been provided leaked emails as given to WikiLeaks last year, would not have released them to the public. In her mind, “WikiLeaks did what news organizations used to do when newsworthy leaks were given to them.”
She calls Trump “the anti-smear candidate” and explains why, in her new book, he “is Kryptonite to the smear.” She says, “Every smear tactic used against him kind of bounces off of him.”
In fact, she says, he was able to “grab it, co-opt it and turn it around, in most every case,” doing the opposite of what seems intuitive to politicians. The more the media and smear merchants tried to manipulate antagonism towards Trump, “the public liked him.”
As an example, what began as a progressive project to censor conservative news as “fake news,” has been hijacked by Trump, who embraces the term against the mainstream media. Now, Attkisson says the initiators want to stop discussing “fake news.”
For more on Attkisson, see her website, see both of her Facebook pages, follow her on Twitter @SharylAttkisson or get her books, “The Smear,” and “Stonewalled.”
Meghan Flynn is credited with the video work for this piece.
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