Watch This Video: John Oliver Indicts CNN for Helping Donald Trump Win

This video, of John Oliver’s last show for 2016, shown on November 14, includes this admission by the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker:

“If we made a mistake last year, it’s that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months, unedited, and just let them run.  And I think in hindsight we probably shouldn’t have done that as much.”

As I wrote in a recent post, Donald had a book of Hitler’s speeches that he studied and that gave him the material he needed to refine his own speaking style and content in such a way that he became almost as mesmerizing a speaker as was Hitler himself.  This speaking style, combined with CNN’s habit of allowing his speeches to run unedited and with little or no comment from the moderators, allowed him to enter the psyches of low-information people, especially those in rural areas where almost their only exposure to news was to have the television playing in the background while they ate at a cafe or truckstop.  How many people were hypnotized by exposure to CNN running Donald’s speeches while they ate in restaurants and truck stops throughout rural America?

Once the television news readers began to catch on to Donald’s habit of repeating false and fake news, combined with his frequent bald faced lies when confronted with problematic statements that he had made, they started to run banners on the lower part of the television screen showing corrections to statements he was making.  However, it was too late, because as John Oliver explains in his show:

“The problem is that the impact of corrections like that which may have sunk a candidate in another era is compromised because there is no longer a consensus on what a fact is.  Trust in mainstream news has been falling.”

Oliver goes on to cite studies which show that a majority of adults state that they get their news from social media (62%) and 44% specifically from Facebook.  Buzzfeed, one of the social media sites, performed a study of the news prior to the election that showed that 38% of the news on Republican leaning pages is partly or completely false, and 19% of the news on Democratic leaning pages is also partly or completely false.  This means that nearly a fifth of the news on Democratic sites is false and over a nearly two fifths of the news on Republican sites is also false.

People who lean towards one party, or towards liberal or conservative viewpoints, get almost all of their news on social media from sites that lean in the same direction, leading to an echo chamber effect in which the only news they receive agrees with their views.  This is because the media, especially Facebook, is set up to agree with or “like” the same sources that their consumers “like.”

Donald is especially in thrall to these same fake news sites and frequently echos their false or distorted news items.  When he is confronted by news people who tell him that the stories he has re-tweeted are false, he responds dismissively as  if he has no responsibility to find out for himself whether the stories he repeats are accurate or not.