CNN Is Just The Latest News Outlet To Prove Deliberate Lying Is Not An Impediment to Employment
2nd November 2020
In September, 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed that became an instant media sensation. The content of the opinion piece was unremarkable: banal anti-Trump agitprop. Noting “the president’s amorality,” the author wrote that Trump “is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making” and his “impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic” — no different than what one reads virtually every day from that paper’s small army of relentlessly on-script anti-Trump columnists or that one hears daily on panels assembled by MSNBC or CNN.
But what triggered so much media attention was that the author of the anti-Trump denunciation was “a senior official in the Trump administration” who claimed that he and other like-minded dissidents were “resisting” and “thwarting” the elected president from inside the government. Moreover, the New York Times took the extraordinary step of granting anonymity to the author. All of that created an exciting parlor game in which media and political insiders attempted to guess the mysterious author’s identity.