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June 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

23:59

CNN Gets Utterly Pantsed | Ep. 328

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	The media are over the moon about a new poll from Pew Research Center.
	The new poll surveyed some 40,000 people across 37 countries, and it turns out foreigners don't like President Trump as much as they liked President Obama.
	Shocker.
	While 64% of such foreigners had confidence in President Obama at the end of his term, just 22% had confidence in Trump.
	Favorability toward the United States dropped from 64% to 49% as well.
	Confidence in President Trump to do the right thing versus Obama dropped in every single country except for two.
	Israel, where President Obama was widely and correctly perceived to be anti-Israel, pro-Iran, pro-Palestinian.
	49% of Israelis trusted Obama to do the right thing versus 56% for Trump.
	And Russia, where Trump's consistently sycophantic rhetoric toward the Russian government did not go unnoticed.
	11% trusted Obama versus 53% for Trump.
	The countries that saw the biggest drops are generally sophisticated democratic socialist countries like Sweden, 83% drop.
	The Netherlands, 75% drop.
	And Germany, 75% drop.
	The different views of Obama and Trump on the world stage reflect a basic truth.
	Foreigners prefer a reticent America.
	First, it is unfair to Trump to pretend that his unpopularity globally is some sort of Republican outlier.
	By the time George W. Bush left office, his ratings were almost identical to Trump's in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain.
	That's not a shock.
	The world loves an America that pays their bills without attempting to promote any of our interests.
	In fact, the Pew poll also shows that Trump is more unpopular than Vladimir Putin, a murderous thug dictator who has invaded foreign countries with regularity.
	Foreigners prefer an American policy that favors Iran nuclear weapon development, 49% versus 34%.
	More Muslim immigration, 62% to 32%.
	Support for climate change strictures, 71% to 19%.
	And lack of a border wall, 76% to 16%.
	They see Trump as arrogant, 75%.
	Intolerant, 65%.
	climate change strictures, 71% to 19%, and lack of a border wall, 76% to 16%.
	They see Trump as arrogant, 75% intolerant, 65% and dangerous, 62%.
	But 55% also see Trump as a strong leader.
	Again, not a shock.
	46% of foreigners dislike American ideas about democracy.
	Again, it's just 43% who approve, which is weird since we actually promoted democracy across the world.
	54% complain about American ideas and customs spreading here.
	Again, weird since they watch all of our movies and consume all of our product.
	And herein lies the truth about Trump.
	All of the foibles to which commentators are apt to attribute his unpopularity with foreigners are mere cover for the real issue, that Trump is not a left-winger who wants to minimize American power on the world stage while turning over our moral leadership to the UN.
	All of which suggest that Trump is right.
	America First policymaking, which is a radical shift away from the multipolarity sought by the Obama administration, is what is truly annoying people around the globe.
	Which is good, if the alternative is the moral cowardice of the Obama administration for the last eight years.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Okay, so we begin with what is hilarious videos.
	James O'Keefe, who is constantly ripped by the news media because they don't like that he goes undercover to do his journalism.
	He was originally responsible for breaking ACORN, the community organizing organization responsible for pushing left-wing agenda.
	James O'Keefe has now dropped a video of CNN senior producer John Bonifield.
	John Bonifield, I guess he's a senior health producer or something, but he's a senior producer talking candidly about CNN's treatment of the Trump administration generally and Trump-Russia collusion allegations specifically, and it's just spectacular stuff.
	Here's from James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, CNN producer John Bonifield basically acknowledging and agreeing that all of our preconceptions about CNN's bias and their agenda are exactly right.
	So you believe like the Russia thing is a little crazy, right?
	Even if Russia was trying to swing an election, we try to swing their elections.
	We're in our CIA and doing it all the time.
	We're out there trying to manipulate governments.
	You win because you know the game and you play it right.
	She didn't play it right.
	Why is CNN constantly like, Russia this, Russia that?
	Because it's ratings.
	Because it's ratings?
	Our ratings are incredible right now.
	But honestly, you'd think the whole Russia st is just like bullst. Could be bullst. I mean, it's mostly bullst right now.
	Like, we don't have any big giant proof.
	I just feel like they don't really have it, but they want to keep digging.
	And so I think the president is probably right to say, like, look, you are witch hunting me.
	Like, you have no smoking gun.
	Okay, so he's saying a bunch of things here that we already knew.
	Number one, CNN is focusing on Russia for the ratings, which is obvious.
	I mean, they focused on Malaysian flight MH370 for like three years and had Don Lemon talking about black holes opening up in the sky to eat flights.
	Don Lemon doesn't know anything.
	So it's...
	It's not a shock that they've been focusing on Russia.
	And this is true, right?
	It doesn't matter what's going on in the news.
	If you turn over to CNN, what you get is Trump-Russia.
	And the reason is because CNN has been providing wish fulfillment for the far left for months now.
	The wish fulfillment is that Trump is going to get caught colluding with Russia.
	He'll somehow be ousted.
	As Sally Cohn says, we'll have a special election.
	Then Hillary Clinton will be president.
	Okay, that's what CNN has been doing for literally months.
	This has been their agenda.
	It has raised their ratings.
	When there actually is news to break, then CNN's ratings are good.
	When there's no news to break, and they're just spouting about Russia still, then there's not, like tonight, I think, CNN is supposed to be running a special about Trump-Russia, the big story.
	And there's nothing there.
	There's nothing there.
	And Bonnefield is honest enough to admit that, although he probably wouldn't have admitted it if he knew he was on tape.
	When he says that Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, Told all the producers that when they were covering the Paris Climate Accords and Trump's pullout from them that you get back to talking Russia because he wants the ratings.
	Again, this is just confirmation of what we already knew.
	Bonnefield also said that if CNN had treated Obama like this, it wouldn't have gone over well at all because obviously their fans tend to like Obama, whereas they hate Trump.
	And so they have been wildly dishonest in how they've covered Trump.
	It's all true, okay?
	Everything that Bonifield is saying is true, and all of it confirms what we already knew about CNN, which is that they are biasing their journalism in order to target President Trump, and he is right that they are on a— President Trump is right that they are on a witch hunt.
	Now, that wasn't the only bad story for CNN last night.
	Also fired three journalists responsible for a single-sourced anonymous story that they broke at CNN.com.
	They were accusing Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci of being investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee for contact with a Russian bank a few days before the inauguration.
	CNN ended up retracting the story and firing the three journalists responsible for the story.
	Naturally, as my friend John Nolte points out, CNN also added that it's possible, quote, the facts of the story weren't necessarily wrong.
	So this is the Dan Rather approach.
	We're going to retract the story.
	We're going to fire the guy responsible.
	But it's possible that the facts were still correct.
	OK, again, just evidence of CNN's bias.
	So this, of course, sets off President Trump.
	And President Trump promptly tweets, quote, fake fake news.
	CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories.
	Ratings way down.
	Well, the first half is true.
	The second half is not.
	Their ratings are not way down.
	Their ratings are actually way up because of all the conspiratorial bullcrap.
	It would be better if their ratings were down because of all the conspiratorial bullcrap, but they aren't.
	And then he says, wow, CNN had to retract big story on Russia with three employees forced to resign.
	What about all the other phony stories they do?
	Fake news.
	Again, totally fair.
	And then he said, you know, fake news, this fake news, that fake news.
	What about the Washington Post and New York Times and ABC and NBC and CBS?
	Right.
	So all of this, there is truth to this.
	Obviously, CNN has biases.
	They refuse to acknowledge their biases.
	It's one of the more annoying things about CNN.
	If they just said, listen, we're a left wing outlet like MSNBC, like no one cares that MSNBC covers Russia incessantly because MSNBC is openly to the left.
	I mean, they're leaning forward, right?
	CNN pretends it's objective, which is why CNN is the easiest whipping boy in the media business.
	And I will say that CNN did more than, for example, the Trump administration has done when people in the administration have lied.
	They actually fired people forthwith.
	When this story came out, they fired three reporters.
	Now, does this mean that they're suddenly great at their jobs?
	No, but that's at least a form of accountability.
	Naturally, Fox News jumped on this as well, jumped on all of this.
	Tucker Carlson ripped CNN to their propaganda organization.
	Again, this is mostly right.
	It's been seven months, though, since Trump won the presidential election.
	Since then, precisely no evidence has emerged to support the claim that Trump somehow colluded with the Russian government in order to win the race.
	But you'd never know that from watching that channel, which has become home for conspiracists on the Russia question worldwide.
	Last February, to name yet another example, CNN produced a story accusing Trump associates of repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
	That report turned out to be almost identical to a report by the New York Times that Jim Comey called out specifically for being grossly inaccurate.
	We could go on and on and on.
	Overall, 93% of CNN's coverage of the Trump administration has been negative.
	Hey, everything Tucker is saying here is true, that CNN is an anti-Trump machine.
	Really?
	No question about it.
	And then Sean Hannity goes on TV last night and he calls for Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, to be fired.
	He says, hey, CNN, when will you fire Zucker?
	He has destroyed the network with lies and very fake news.
	Very fake news.
	Now, again, I think that Sean calling for Zucker to be fired over the coverage at CNN is a mistake for Sean.
	I mean, I defended Sean over the Seth Rich stuff, not because I thought he was right on it, but because I don't like these kind of astroturfed boycotts where people end up losing their jobs because they don't like the way that somebody is covering the news.
	And here's Sean calling for Jeff Zucker to be fired over his coverage of the news.
	Again, I just—the hypocrisy is a little much for me.
	Is all this criticism of CNN fair?
	Absolutely it's fair, but I do want to discuss whether the term fake news is useful or not anymore, because I'm not sure that it is useful.
	So when fake news was originally coined, the term fake news was originally coined, what it meant was a story that was outright false.
	So for example, that piece that CNN retracted, that was actual fake news, right?
	That was a piece of fake news.
	CNN's Russia collusion stuff, when they actually try to aver that there is collusion or evidence thereof, that is fake news.
	It is not fake news when they report a specific story About a Trump associate who had a contact with Russians and then it's verified, right?
	It's not a fake story when CNN reports about what Trump said to Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office, right?
	That is not fake news.
	So we have to distinguish two types of news that people don't like.
	One type of news is news that is just the facts are wrong, right?
	That's actual fake news.
	We don't like those.
	Those are real fake news.
	And then there are stories where we don't like the angle the news is taking.
	We don't like the bias that's being infused into the news.
	And this is where I find trouble because, you know, President Trump, he's out there saying all these networks are quote-unquote fake news, fake news.
	If you conflate these two categories, you make it so that it is impossible to have a common basis of fact for any sort of political conversation.
	So when he says CNN is fake news, I don't think that's right.
	I don't.
	I think that CNN is a wildly left news outlet that biases their coverage in tremendous ways.
	I don't think that's quote-unquote fake news.
	You can say it's fake objective news.
	That's true.
	You can say it's non-objective news.
	That's true.
	But when you just say it's fake news, like everything you see on CNN is false, That's not true.
	And this is coming from a guy who went on CNN in 2014 and said, if Hamas could design a propaganda network, it would look a lot like CNN.
	This is in the middle of the Gaza War.
	So it's not like I have any great love and honor for CNN.
	I mean, for God's sake, I basically destroyed one of their main hosts on their show, right?
	I mean, I took Piers Morgan and destroyed him on CNN.
	I've ripped CNN on CNN multiple times.
	So this is not about defending CNN.
	This is about, as the American public, How do we know what information we can trust and what information we can't?
	We sort of have the Vizzini problem.
	You remember from Princess Bride, where Vizzini gets into a battle of wits with Wesley, and Vizzini has the... Wesley takes iocane powder and supposedly he puts it in one of the two cups, and then Vizzini, who's the cleverest man alive, according to Vizzini, has to try and outwit him.
	And so he does the whole, I'm not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you!
	But you must have known I was not a great fool, and you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!
	Right?
	You remember that whole routine?
	What happens when President Trump routinely says things that are not true, or Sean Hannity says things about Seth Rich that are unverified?
	I mean, last night, Sean Hannity was still on Twitter, saying he's still investigating the Seth Rich thing, which is, you know, Come on.
	I mean, really, like, enough already.
	Like, you have no new evidence.
	You talk about Trump collusion.
	Trump-Russia collusion has no evidence.
	You have no evidence on the Seth Rich stuff, but you're still pursuing it, and then claiming conspiracy theories on the other side.
	This is just about a little bit of intellectual honesty, folks.
	If you can't trust Trump, and you can't trust Fox, and you can't trust CNN, then who can you trust?
	And I'm not suggesting that you can trust me, by the way, to be unbiased, because I'm pretty open about my biases.
	I'm conservative, right?
	I'm conservative.
	That means that my coverage of the news is going to be infused with a certain level of conservative bias.
	For sure.
	But it is a mistake to label every single mainstream media outlet fake news, as President Trump does, because it actually blows back on Trump.
	The next time CNN reports something that is true, and Trump calls it fake news, Trump looks like a liar.
	He's right.
	He is right that all of these outlets are biased against him.
	He is right that they attack him in a way they never would have attacked President Obama.
	And I'm glad that President Trump goes up against the media all the time.
	In my book, Bullies, I said this is exactly what politicians should do.
	But the point in Bullies was that you should go after these outlets when they lie.
	You shouldn't just label the entire outlet completely uncredible and suggest that everything that they report is false because that's not actually true.
	Like, if you're going to defeat lies, you have to do it with truth.
	And if you're going to defeat bias, you have to do it by calling out the bias.
	You can't defeat bias by just saying that everything that somebody says that is biased is complete fake news and all lies and garbage.
	Right now what we have is Trump attacks combined with the media's drooling preoccupation with getting Trump.
	It ends up polarizing the narrative.
	Right now, I'm telling because this is the world I live in, right now people on the right will not believe a word that comes from CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post, even though all of their favorite websites, you know, Breitbart, I used to work there, right?
	I was the editor at large there for four years.
	I was deeply involved in editorial for two of those four years.
	Breitbart, which is a very pro-Trump website, obviously, they rip half their news from the mainstream media at least, okay?
	The notion that Breitbart is doing original reporting is not true.
	I mean, they do some original reporting, but the bulk of what they cover is a Breitbart angle on a news story that has been previously reported by CNN or the New York Times.
	The same thing is true in talk radio.
	And everybody in talk radio will acknowledge this, right?
	I mean, the fact is that when you listen to Rush, when you listen to Sean, Half of Sean's coverage on his radio show is him reading an AP story and then deconstructing the AP story trying to get to the fact.
	So pretending that all of the news is fake is just not true.
	And what you end up with is this bizarre situation where people on the right will only trust Fox News and people on the left will only trust CNN.
	And if they hear that something happened on Fox News, they go, it's complete crap.
	Benghazi's a perfect example.
	Fox News was leading the charge in terms of uncovering material about Benghazi, and the left just said, oh, it's Fox News, who cares?
	And then the right does the same thing with CNN.
	Every time there's a story bad for Trump, they say, oh, it's just CNN, who cares?
	I want to talk about what we should do to defeat all of this, how you can watch the news and get more out of it.
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	Okay, so here's how I want to boil down all of this media debate, and again, CNN is what they are.
	They're a wildly biased anti-right network masquerading as an objective news source, sometimes running stories without proper substantiation that they then have to back off of.
	But to pretend that every piece of CNN coverage is a lie is not true, just as for the left to pretend during the Obama years that everything coming out of Fox News was not true.
	Here are some basic truths.
	There are only three of them, so you can handle this.
	We're all capable of handling this, okay?
	All journalists are biased.
	All of them, even if they won't admit it.
	There are some who try harder to keep their own biases out of the news.
	You know, I think that there are people who are widely hated on the right and widely hated on the left.
	I think Brett Baier does a good job of trying to keep his biases out of the news.
	I think on the left, I mean, Jake Tapper's clearly the left.
	I think Tapper does a better job than most of trying to keep his biases out of the news, although Jake obviously has his own biases.
	But all journalists are biased, okay?
	And anyone who pretends not is lying to you.
	Second, either the facts of a story are factual or they are not.
	Okay, there's two parts to every story.
	There's the facts and there's the opinion.
	And you have to become kind of sophisticated in how you look at the news.
	This is why you listen to or watch shows like this, so that we can break down a story and explain to you what is opinion from what is fact, what is actually being said in the news story, and what is the news media getting out ahead of themselves, right?
	The facts of a story are either factual, however, or they are not.
	The bias of a journalist may impact how the facts are presented, but it doesn't automatically discredit the facts that are presented.
	So if CNN covers the Trump-Russia stuff, and then draws a conclusion that there's collusion, and the conclusion is wrong, that doesn't discredit the underlying facts upon which they are reporting.
	Maybe their conclusion is wrong because they're biased.
	Maybe the way they're reporting the story is wrong because they're biased.
	But that doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying facts are wrong.
	The same is true on the right.
	The left would suggest that the rights coverage of the IRS scandal was all lies.
	It was all fake news.
	But that did not discredit any of the underlying factual claims.
	That Lois Lerner and the IRS were obviously targeting conservative 501c3s in an attempt to prevent them from being able to raise money.
	And that they were doing so because Democrats have been calling for years for them to do exactly that.
	That was the underlying news.
	Now the left may not have liked the conclusion the right was drawing, which is that Obama basically ordered it.
	But that didn't discredit the underlying news.
	So, it is your job as a news consumer to try and distinguish the fact from the opinion in any given story without just doing this routine where you say, okay, CNN is all fake news, or Fox News is all fake news, and everybody should be fired because I disagree with them.
	Again.
	Do I think CNN is egregious?
	Yes, I think they're egregious in their coverage of Trump.
	I think they are just egregious in their coverage of Trump.
	And I think that producer demonstrates how egregious they are in their coverage of Trump.
	But that does not actually change the underlying facts.
	And to pretend that CNN doesn't feel the heat when they do something wrong is just silly.
	I mean, they just fired three reporters.
	We make a living over at Daily Wire bashing CNN when they get things wrong.
	To pretend that they are not subject to scrutiny is just dishonest.
	So, again, this is not a defense of CNN's activity anywhere along the line here.
	But I'm suggesting to you that you are going to be blindsided by the news if you do what so many on the right are doing and say, I only trust the people on the right to report me the news, even though the people on the right are relying on the left to actually report those facts.
	CNN has staff on the ground.
	Daily Wire is not independently reporting from Yemen.
	And the truth is, neither is Fox News in many cases.
	So I just want to clarify all of that, because I think it'll make you a better news consumer and better able to distinguish between good news coverage and bad news coverage instead of doing this ridiculous partisan knee-jerk crap where people at CNN go, people on the left go, oh, Fox News can't be trusted.
	Everything they say is a lie.
	And people, faux news, right?
	They did this for eight years.
	I was there.
	And people on the right going, oh, it's from the New York Times.
	How dare you quote the New York Times!
	I promise you, Gateway Pundit is quoting that same New York Times story, whether it's an attempt to debunk the New York Times story or an attempt to grant credibility to the New York Times story, because most reporting is done by the mainstream media outlets that dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars every year to sending reporters to the field.
	Okay.
	I want to talk about the breakdown in Trumpcare and where that goes from here, but for that, you're going to have to subscribe.
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