Project Veritas Leaks Show The Inner Workings of CNN

On Tuesday, Project Veritas started publishing clips from leaked recordings of CNN's 9 am meetings in what Project Veritas’ founder and CEO James O’Keefe calls an ‘advent calendar’ of releases.

The recordings feature many prominent CNN personalities and reporters including CNN President Jeff Zucker, Executive VP David Vigilante, and Political Director David Chalian.

In the clips, Zucker and others can be heard prescribing the news network’s responses to current events and coordinating the ‘spin’ angle in which politically important stories of the day should be covered. 

In a recording from October 1st, for example, Zucker instructs his staff not to give credence to Trump’s claims about election uncertainty and election fraud. Suggesting that Trump himself is a ‘national security threat’, Zucker aims to dismiss election integrity concerns. 

In the recordings, the approach that CNN leadership takes towards their reporting is in plain view. When a story is breaking in the media or on the internet, a response is set which the staff is to follow. In relation to Trump’s comments about COVID-19, Zucker says: ‘we cannot normalize’ what Trump says and does. In a November 9 recording, CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel says: “we have to be, you know, news organizations have to be very careful and very responsible about not giving Trump too much of a platform on his not conceding...”. 

Amid the Hunter Biden controversy which famously resulted in The New York Post being de-platformed from Twitter, Chalian is heard instructing CNN staff on what to do: “Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden.” Vigilante adds: “we should be awfully careful about that obviously, but I do think there is a media story. What in the world are Maggie Haberman [CNN political analyst] and Jake Sherman [reporter for Politico] doing retweeting that story?” Instead of aiming to investigate the potentially election-breaking story, Zucker simply relies on the Wall Street Journal’s claim that there is ‘no role for Joe Biden on the Chinese deal’, dismissing the story altogether.

Additional recordings show CNN’s leadership response to other situations and political developments, as well as their overall political views. All of the clips are available on YouTube. More news is bound to break, as Project Veritas plans to release many more clips over the following days and weeks.

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