Steve Cortes, former CNN factor and current co-host of Newsmax’s Cortes & Pellegrino, told Breitbart News on Monday that CNN consistently provided him with inaccurate show notes prior to his looks on the network throughout the 2016 governmental election season in order to weaken his political analysis and commentary.
“CNN is even worse off-air than on-air,” Cortes mentioned in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Marlow asked, “How did [CNN] treat you while you existed?”
Cortes replied, “Honestly? Awfully, just to put it bluntly. Yeah, horrible. They were as impolite as could be, They are– believe it or not– CNN is even worse off-air than on-air in terms of their commitment to their story. They truly think that they’re on a sort of holy war versus what they deem as xenophobic nationalistic bigotry, which’s truly, really what they believe we represent.”
CNN’s operators see their political objective as virtuous, Cortes held.
He said, “They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on some worthy mission, and because of that, they also believe that completions validate the means, that they can use any tactic– no matter how deceitful, no matter how deceptive– any technique to attempt to defang, as they would most likely view it, the America First motion. Unfortunately, I got a front-row seat to a great deal of that treachery behind the scenes, and I can inform the listeners out there that it’s even worse than they may have guessed.”
Cortes shared that CNN sent him phony program notes ahead of sections he was scheduled to appear on while sending out correct show keeps in mind to other contributors and visitors.
Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo(D-NY)and his bro Chris Cuomo, host of CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, attend a screening throughout the 2018 Tribeca Movie Festiva, April 26, 2018, in New York City.(Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Celebration)
“I’ll provide you an example of the dishonesty to be specific,” Cortes mentioned. “They would send notes prior to the program, and this is really typical for actually any show, definitely in cable television news or any news show, duration. You send out notes to everybody who’s going to be associated with the segment. ‘Here are the topics we’re going to discuss. Here are sound bites we’re going to play,’ and that’s simply regular standard operating procedure. I worked for Fox News before CNN. I am now a host at Newsmax. The same note at normal networks goes to everybody, fine? You don’t modify the note. You do not send 2 different variations.”
He continued, “At CNN, there were two different versions. There was one sent to everybody else, and then one sent to me, and the one sent to me didn’t have very much information, or it would have inaccurate info. ‘We’re going to discuss X,’ when in reality, we’re going to really talk about Y. They would constantly declare, ‘Oh, that was a mistake.’ It wasn’t a mistake. It was clear.”
“Despite the fact that I worked for them, it was this odd circumstance where I was being paid by CNN, and yet they were continuously trying to make me look silly,” he added, “continuously trying to trick me about … the subject we were speaking about. They never ever was successful, luckily. I simply did my homework. Most of the time, by the method, might you might fairly well guess what they were going to speak about, whatever they believed was most embarrassing to President Trump that day. But the tactics behind the scenes were much more dishonest than what you see on screen, which is stating something since what you see on screen is quite risible.”
CNN mediator Don Lemon talks to the crowd going to the Democratic Presidential Debate at the Fox Theatre, July 31, 2019, in Detroit, Michigan. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) CNN markets itself as a politically unbiased and non-partisan news media outlet. It previously branded itself “the most trusted name in news.”
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