SALON

Glenn Greenwald

Friday, Feb 17, 2012 10:07 AM UTC

Erin Burnett: Worst of the worst

The CNN host speaks on the "frightening" Iranian threat in ways that have to be seen to be believed VIDEO

By

Topics:

Erin Burnett: Worst of the worstErin Burnett (Credit: AP/Amanda Schwab)

(updated below – Update II [Sat.])

I’m finishing up a long investigative article that will be posted later this morning, but I just could not let go unnoted this commentary on The Iranian Threat by CNN’s Erin Burnett (“frightening,” she observed). I barely know what to say about it — the critiques of media fear-mongering I wrote the last two days apply in spades to this — but it really just mocks itself. It’s the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn’t dare go this far because you’d want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran’s long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.

I’ll just note that she begins her remarks by announcing that “no one buys Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes,” and to prove her point, she immediately introduces footage of yesterday’s Congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper which, she said, “drove that message home.” Except the clip then showed Clapper saying this: “Iran’s technical advances . . . strengthen our assessment that Iran is more than capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders, specifically the Supreme Leader himself, choose to do so.” Is there really not a single brain in the entire CNN apparatus that stirs in the presence of a contradiction this glaring that it virtually screams its demand to be recognized? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Leon Panetta just yesterday said “the intelligence does not show that they’ve made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon,” a fact that Burnett did not manage to mention, even though the same fact was also expressed last month by Israeli officials (“The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon”).

But truly: that huge lapse at the start was the peak of journalistic quality for Burnett’s commentary. It all went straight downhill from there, to depths so lowly you have to witness it to appreciate. When you behold things like this, the mystery isn’t that such a huge portion of the American population ultimately embraced the falsehoods that led to the attack on Iraq — or ended up believing lies like this — it’s that so many managed to resist them:

 

UPDATE: Michael Calderone, The Huffington Post‘s media reporter, has a good article today entitled “Iran Nuclear Coverage Echoes Iraq War Media Frenzy.”

 

UPDATE II [Sat.]: After numerous people vocied their criticisms to Burnett on Twitter, I had a brief exchange with her yesterday, which The Huffington Post wrote about here. And Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi weighs on all of these issues here.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 297 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Glenn Greenwald (email: GGreenwald@salon.com) is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's

two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.




Continue Reading

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Who is "Company Doe"? Corporations accused of wrongdoing win battle to keep identities secret
41 points42 points | 1 comment
vote
"Slave descendants seek equal rights from Cherokee Nation": long, detailed narrative of legal and historical complications in red-white-black relations
29 points30 points | 1 comment
vote
Who is "Company Doe"? Corporations accused of wrongdoing win battle to keep identities secret
6 points7 points | comment
vote
Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic shows the famously flamboyant entertainer as a person, not a stereotype
5 points6 points | comment
vote
Experts: Fox News spying scandal a game-changer - I think that crackdown is ideologically driven and I think it’s hard to come to a different conclusion given the vigor with which this justice department has gone after people. So I think it is about a method of control that is badly misplaced.
4 points5 points | 6 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Latest Tweets

Recommendations