A staff of CNN has revealed how the network peddled propaganda, including hyping COVID-19 data, that helped oust President Donald Trump from office.
Charlie Chester, a Technical Director at CNN, revealed this during a series of Tinder dates with an undercover journalist that was secretly filmed by Project Veritas.
“Look what we did, we (CNN) got Trump out. I am 100 percent going to say it, and I 100 percent believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out,” Chester said, adding that he came to work at CNN because he ”wanted to be a part of that.”
He described the hyping of COVID-19 data that portrayed the government as incompetent as “gangbusters with ratings”.
One of the strategies, he said, was to plaster the death toll on a side of the screen during programming.
“Let’s make it higher. Like why isn’t it high enough today? We make our point better if it’s higher,” Chester said on one date of the plot to use COVID-19 data to sway voters against Trump, who sought and lost his re-election bid in November 2020.
In yet another, he said, “Fear drives numbers (ratings). Fear is the thing that keeps you tuned in.”
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He recalled a particular time when the “Head of the Network” ordered the casualty figures to be returned after it was removed from the screen.
Chester said, “Like this special red phone rings, and they pick it up and it’s like the head of the network being like ‘There’s nothing that you’re doing right now that makes me want to stick. Put the numbers back up, because that’s the most enticing thing that we had. So put it (COVID-19 numbers) back up’.
“So things like that are constantly talked about.”
Chester went on to add during another date that, “There’s no such thing as unbiased news. It doesn’t exist.”
He said that the reporters were always told “what to say”, as against reporting the news objectively.
“It’s like leading them in a direction before they even open their mouths.
“And the only people that we will let on the air, for the most part, are people that have a proven track record of taking the bait.”