Is CNN Putin's Puppet?

If Vladimir Putin wanted to delegitimize the American election system and set American against American - and CNN didn't exit - he would have to create it.

As it is, CNN is doing Putin's work to destabilize the United States.

Here's an interesting excerpt from a Medium column written in 2017 about a Fareed Zakaria "special" tying Putin to Trump:

Major props to CNN — all of this is very clever and slickly produced, just like a propaganda film should be. It’s easy to see how the average American, watching on TV, would conclude that Russia is a sad, cold place where only power-hungry madmen like Putin can survive and prosper. CNN desperately wants you to think there’s a link between Putin and Trump, and this is their news-entertainment-scripted TV show to bring that idea into your living room (if you actually still get cable TV, that is).

Unfortunately, this approach to winning hearts and minds using TV is exactly what Peter Pomerantsev wrote about in his book about Russian propaganda television— “Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible.” Ironic, eh? CNN has taken the tactics of what Pomerantsev and the whole anti-Russia crew (Ioffe, Gessen, Remnick) call “Russian propaganda” and used it to create its own Russophobia-influenced TV special. This is what slick propaganda for the masses looks like in the digital era, and it’s all coming from the mainstream media elites in New York who are willing to say outrageous things on TV.

What made my stomach turn was how this CNN special really tried to de-legitimize the views of two people — Stephen Cohen and Henry Kissinger — who have been basically the only two high-profile people who have tried to provide an intellectual (not ideological) justification for Russia’s actions over the past three years. And former President George Bush (“43”) is basically characterized as a guileless dupe for believing he could read into Putin’s soul.

But here’s what the CNN show didn’t include:

1 — The fact that Fareed Zakaria is COMPLICIT in his own way. He’s been a host at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where Russia cozies up to the West for investment capital. And that was when Russia was under sanctions! (Just Google “Putin crushes CNN smart ass Fareed Zakaria”)

2 — The fact that Hillary Clinton was a supporter of the “reset” with Russia back in 2008. That was after eight years of Putin in power, so you can’t say that she didn’t know better. If Bush and Trump were duped, then so was Hillary.

3 — Any evidence of collusion between Putin and Trump. Not a scrap. Plenty of hearsay. Plenty of rumors. But no evidence. C’mon, CNN, at least go out and interview someone from Cozy Bear if you’re going to implicate them in a hacker attack.

4 — Any evidence that Russia is anything more than a “regional power,” as Barack Obama famously described Russia. Yes, Russia can have its way with a neighbor like Ukraine, but the U.S.? Really? At one point, Dmitry Peskov basically tells Zakaria, “Look, you’re embarrassing yourself. How could we have interfered in the election of the world’s only superpower?” ....

CNN is now in the business of being a mixed entertainment/news provider. When it comes to Russia, it’s job is to take opinions, rumors and innuendos and repackage it in a middlebrow way for the mass market. So we get these “the U.S. president is a sleeper agent of the Kremlin” stories.

The more that CNN clings to the Putin-Trump story — a story that it touts every day of the week, in both the morning and evening talks shows, the closer CNN is to becoming a true propaganda network, along the lines of Russia’s RT. That’s literally what propaganda organs do — repeat the same message over and over again, pounding it into people’s heads.

The one thing you should know about a propaganda TV network is that it looks largely like a regular TV network. You can’t really tell it’s a propaganda network until you watch enough of it. If you want to know what RT looks like, there’s an app for that — download RT to your smartphone. Or check out one of their 33,000 YouTube videos. It’s pretty slick, and the set and anchors look a lot like what you’ll find on CNN these days.