CNN Now Manipulating The News

It's no secret that once the media latches onto a narrative, they run with it, the facts be damned. They have given us George Bush the decisive leader, Al Gore the serial liar, and David Petraeus the independent thinker, to name just a few, and they do this using innuendo, well chosen adjectives or simply through the sin of omission.  But this week CNN chose to cross the line from maintaining a narrative into the outright manipulation of the facts.

Here is how Wolf Blitzer chose to present John McCain repeatedly claiming that Iran was training al Qaeda to fight in Iraq:

But McCain's comments also raised some eyebrows because of a misstatement he quickly corrected after some prodding from his Senate colleague, Joe Lieberman.

Listen to this.

McCAIN [video clip]: We continue to be concerned about Iranian -- taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back. We continue to be concerned about Iranian influence and assistance to Hezbollah, as well as Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons.

I'm sorry. The Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda, not Al Qaeda. I'm sorry.

What's missing?  Only the fact that McCain had made the assertion "several times," and that when pressed he continued to claim that it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate."  

What's unfortunate is that CNN is splicing videos and manipulating their audience in an effort to maintain the illusion that John McCain simply misspoke and "quickly" corrected himself.  McCain has made the same baseless assertions on more than one occasion, but pointing that out doesn't go along with the media narrative that only John McCain has the foreign policy expertise to answer that phone at 3:00 a.m...so CNN fixed it.