The Great Smoky Mountain Journal
Source:
Tuesday, January 01, 2019 02:47 PM
James Comey Interview Puts CNN In Ratings Toilet - Literally
The infamous, unverified dossier generated by Hillary Clinton's campaign -- and used by the Obama Department of Justice to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump's campaign -- mentions without substantiation that Trump watched as prostitutes urinated on one another. The outrageous claim wasn’t taken seriously by most legitimate media organizations until Comey gave the unproven claim new life by mentioning it in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
CNN mentioned the "pee tape" 77 times in a five-day span from April 12-16, according to the Media Research Center. The MRC also pointed out that CNN routinely aired clips of Comey’s tale to Stephanopoulos, resulting in 28 mentions of the vulgar story.
"I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” Comey told Disney-owned ABC News.
Trump has repeatedly said he’s a germaphobe grossed out by the accusation, but that didn’t stop CNN from retelling the story 48 times on April 13 alone, an average of twice per hour, according to MRC.
“For the purpose of this study, a mention was defined as any allusion to the most graphic aspect of the rumor,” MRC’s Bill D’Agostino wrote. “Thus a clip in which James Comey merely mentioned Russian prostitutes would not have factored into the study. Rather, analysts looked only for phrases such as ‘prostitutes urinating on each other,’ ‘the pee tape,’ and, of course, ‘golden showers.’”
Psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert told Fox News that CNN is simply chasing a story, but wonders if network brass has some sort of obsession related to the lewd details.
“Whether this is driven by fact or hope, prioritizing urophilia -- better known as golden showers and watersports -- over hard news stories seems to be an effort to find a ‘gotcha’ moment. One could argue that being fascinated by someone else's fascination with golden showers is in itself a fetish -- a fetish by proxy,” Alpert said. “But like all relationships between news organizations and presidents, some are strained and others are conciliatory, so this is par for the course.”
The MRC recently conducted another study “to cover CNN’s bizarre obsession with toilet language,” which found that the network used the uncensored version of the term “s—thole” a whopping 195 times in a single day.