CNN under Ted Turner used to have a world-class news team, they'd check sources, they'd investigate the veracity of any claims, they'd get boots on the ground to do their own research. They wouldn't hesitate to get actual experts on the air, people with qualifications relevant to the situation at hand.
They also had the luxury of being able to dig into a story before "breaking" it, there was time to get everything lined up. Now we're in an unrelenting hurricane where something pops up on Twitter and literally five minutes later CNN is parroting it as if it's news.
There's no budget for fact checking. There's no time. There's no buffer against the stream of half-truths, propaganda, and pure bullshit pouring out of this thing we call the internet.
There used to be a substantial difference between The Washington Post and Weekly World News. Today that gap has shrunk to the point where pseudo-news stories end up being published without adequate fact checking and retractions come way too late, if they ever do at all.
CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War was respectable, they had people in Baghdad observing the situation on the ground. Even their September 11 coverage was pretty good, though they were working on their home turf. By the time complex geopolitical struggles like the insurgency in Iraq or the constantly shifting nature of ISIS emerged they had no ability whatsoever to present a coherent story.
Now I wouldn't trust CNN to report on something as numerically simple as the election. They have "experts" on the air that are so obviously political shills it's ridiculous: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/14/video-cnn-has-trump-...
It's almost as if people don't care for actual news any more. They're tired of eating their vegetables.
Fake news is outright fabricated.
They usually make up shit about celebrities and see what sticks, then beat that drum until people tire of it.
But my mom, who has a doctorate degree in a medical profession and is a director at a medical organization, firmly believes in everything and anything that's mentioned in a tweet that is aired on CNN. Or posted on Facebook overlaid on a picture of a Minion.
> At least American's respected Walter and the news was the news, not personal outrage or even worse intentionally false information.
If there's anything to take away from this, it's that the DNC et. al did not learn their lesson and we're going to be stuck with four more miserable years under Trump come 2020. You cannot attempt fix the outcome of a primary election and still expect everyone to like you.