Between Donald Trump and CNN, the story of a tenacious hatred
Donald Trump fighting CNN in a video? This is only the last episode of a merciless struggle between the President of the United States and the American channel.
Between the editorial staff of CNN and Donald Trump, we have officially passed the stage of cordial understanding or distant contempt.
Sunday, July 2, the American president saw fit to publish on Twitter a montage of him typing on a man with his face covered with a CNN logo, renaming at the same time the editorial staff "Fraud News CNN". The sequence is authentic: it dates from 2007 and is taken from a wrestling match entitled "the battle of the billionaires". A CNN logo has been added to the head of one of his opponents for this video.
Sara Murray, a "horrible journalist"
If the conflict between Donald Trump and the channel goes back several years, it was accentuated during the American presidential campaign, a period during which the Republican repeatedly pinpoints Sara Murray, a CNN reporter.
Thus, in September 2015, the presidential candidate violently attacks Murray, without naming her. He accuses him of lying about the number of people going to his meetings.
"She's a horrible reporter. Oh look, the room is empty! The room was not empty, everyone was standing right next to me. You can tell Jeff Zucker [the president of CNN] that it 'was a disgusting report, "says Donald Trump.
Two months later, Donald Trump does it again: he believes again that Sara Murray has not done her job as a journalist. "She's really bad, your reporter," says the candidate on CNN's New Day show. [...] She never talks about the crowd. I have the biggest crowds! [...] If we do listen to Sara Murray, it feels like there are only three people in Trump Tower. " Host Chris Cuomo is trying to defend his colleague, but Donald Trump persists. "Either she's very cold, or she's not a good journalist. It's one or the other," insists the Republican.
A threat of de-accreditation
Two weeks later, this time it is journalist Noah Gray who is manhandled by Donald Trump's team. As the CNN reporter attempts to interview protesters at a Republican rally in Worcester, Massachusetts, he is threatened with being blacklisted if he does not immediately join the journalists' corner.
.@CLewandowski_ :"inside the pen or I pull your credentials" as I film crowd reax to protestor this evening pic.twitter.com/Gkb2jpC6CY
— Noah Gray (@NoahGrayCNN) November 19, 2015
Noah Gray immortalizes the stunning scene and posts it on Twitter. Throughout the campaign, he is - obviously not the only one to be either kicked out or threatened by Trump's team.
Election fraud denied by CNN
He may have won the presidential election, November 8, 2016, Donald Trump is not done with Hillary Clinton. He assures us that massive fraud has favored the Democrats in certain states.
"Serious electoral fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - why the media do not talk about it?" He protested on Twitter on November 27.
The next day, CNN published an article that firmly contradicted his allegations, enough to explode the anger of the president-elect. "I thought CNN would be better after failing so badly in supporting Hillary Clinton. But since the election, they are much worse!"
Jim Acosta manhandled by Donald Trump
It did not get better last January. CNN then just published the extract of a 35-page report, written by a British counterintelligence agent.
It mentions several compromising information for the American president, in particular on his close relations with the Kremlin. Even though CNN has not, unlike BuzzFeed, published the entire report, Donald Trump refuses to give the floor to journalist Jim Acosta at his press conference on January 11.
"Good for you Jim, standing up for yourself, for this organization" @ErinBurnett to @Acosta re Trump news conference https://t.co/uNhtnYqlOO
— OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) January 12, 2017
"Shut up, shut up", annoys Donald Trump, while Jim Acosta tries to ask him a question, calling his media "horrible" and "fake news".
Live fact-checking on the CNN side
On the CNN side, which Donald Trump regularly calls "Clinton News Network" for a treatment he considers pro-democratic, the responses to these multiple attacks are sometimes funny. The channel decides, for example, to "fact-check" Donald Trump during his speeches, broadcasting live corrections of the president's remarks in his banners.
You get the feeling CNN has had enough of Trump's bullshit pic.twitter.com/pXpGKubNzA
— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 2, 2016
CNN calls out Trump for claiming he was 'sarcastic' about Obama founding ISIS: https://t.co/D8Nn5Y1qQ1 pic.twitter.com/gsDKnDd6VS
— The Hill (@thehill) August 12, 2016
The Kathy Griffin controversy
But sometimes, the members of the chain do not illustrate themselves by their finesse: at the end of last May, a presenter of the channel Kathy Griffin poses with a false head of Donald Trump decapitated and full of blood.
Very quickly, the image caused a scandal, and CNN returned the comedian, who for 10 years co-presented a show for New Years Eve each year on the channel. The American president, he says that his 11-year-old son, Barron, is struggling to recover from this shot, taken by Tyler Shields. "Horrible" !, wrote Trump on Twitter.
Resignation of 3 journalists from CNN
More serious still: the publication, on June 22, of an article assuring that a close friend of the president, Anthony Scaramucci, discussed before the election of Trump with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a Russian investment fund. In the CNN article, several errors are noted by Sputnik News and Breitbart, pro-Trump and pro-Putin media.
The channel withdrew the article from its site because it lacked evidence and received the resignation of three journalists: Thomas Frank, author of the article, 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Lichtblau and Lex Haris, head of the investigation unit from CNN.
Even though CNN says these resignations do not in any way mean that the information in the article was false, Donald Trump is jubilant.
He does not fail to rejoice on Twitter that CNN was taken "hand in the bag". But immediately he wonders, "What about NBC, CBS, and ABC? And the bad New York Times and the Washington Post? These are all fake news!" Because, beyond CNN, it is with the entire press that Donald Trump has had a real problem, since the start of his presidential campaign.
