Friday, August 4, 2017

Fox isn’t the only White House cable news ally. Meet the Christian Broadcasting Network.


Updated by Tara Isabella Burton, www.vox.com

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CBN’s new show Faith Nation blurs the line between journalism and pushing the Trump agenda.

Excerpt:
Faith Nationhosted by CBN anchors David Brody and Jenna Browder, aired its first episode on July 19. It premiered just days after Donald Trump sat down for a one-on-one interview with Robertson, the network’s founder, who made a name for himself with the intensity of his apocalyptic rhetoric. The softball tone of that interview — on the heels of the news that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the presidential campaign — was striking. Striking, too, was the degree to which it seemed to herald an increasing willingness on the part of Trump or his advisers not only to appeal to his evangelical base but to delegitimize the mainstream media on two fronts: as both untrustworthy and, implicitly, ungodly. ...
Faith Nation — and Trump, in enabling it through his selective granting of access — isn’t so much sowing pro-administration propaganda as destabilizing the very idea of truth. Such an approach, of course, isn’t limited to the Trump administration. A recent special report by journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss at the Institute of Modern Russia argues that such tactics are central to the Kremlin’s diplomatic aims in their own “information war” and use of fake news: “not to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) or earn credibility but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods [.]” ... 

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