Truthdig, July 15, 2017

“So, my boss, I shouldn’t say this. … Just to give you some context, Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half, we covered the climate accords. … The CEO of CNN [Jeff Zucker, the network’s president] said in our internal meeting … ‘Good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that. Let’s get back to Russia.’ … So, even the climate accords, he was like ‘OK, a day or so, but we’re moving back to Russia.’ ”

So said CNN co-producer John Bonifieldto an undercover guerilla journalist with the conservative media watchdog group Project Veritas (PV).

By “the climate accords,” Bonifield was referring to President Trump’s decisionlast month to keep his campaign promise to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. The accord, at least symbolically, committed the U.S. to joining the rest of the world in reducing carbon emissions with the hope of averting human extinction through anthropogenic global warming.

‘To See Trump Get Really Scrutinized’

PV caught Bonifield on the same tape expressing doubts about the Russia and Trump story. Bonifield told PV that CNN had been running with this story to an extraordinary degree in pursuit of liberal eyeballs—and the advertising dollars that follow with a growing audience:

PV journalist: So you think the Russia thing is a little crazy, right?

Bonifield: Even if Russia was trying to swing the election, we try to swing their elections, our CIA is doing shit all the time, we’re out there trying to manipulate governments. You win because you know the game and you play it right. She [Hillary] didn’t play it right.

PV: Then why is CNN like constantly, Russia this, Russia that?

Bonifield: Because it’s ratings. Our ratings are incredible right now. … There are a lot of, like, liberal CNN viewers who want to see Trump get really scrutinized. If we would have behaved that way with President Obama, and scrutinized everything he was doing with as much scrutiny as we applied to Donald Trump, I think our viewers would have been turned off. They would have felt like we were attacking him. … I’m not saying all of our viewers are super-liberals, but there’s just a lot of them.

PV: So Trump’s good for business, you’re saying.

Bonifield: Trump is good for business right now.

Just for the record, as of this writing CNN has mentioned Russia on air 16,000 times since Trump’s inauguration.

A ‘Mostly Bullshit Nothing Burger’

The undercover journalist pressed further:

PV: But, honestly you think the whole Russia shit is just bullshit.”

Bonifield: Could be bullshit. I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now. Like, we don’t have any big giant proof. But then they say, “Well, there’s still an investigation going on,” and you’re like, “Yeah.” I don’t know, if [they] were finding something, we’d know about it. … The way these leaks happen, they’d leak it. They’d leak. If it was something really good, it would leak. … I think the president is right to say like, “Look, you are witch-hunting me. Like, you have no smoking gun. You have no real proof.”