What should be the attitude of the media towards someone notable for being the purveyor of the biggest election 2020 fake news story? Shun them? That would be the correct attitude for such journalism malpractice. However, in the case of CNN it actually promoted such a person. Natasha Bertrand who was the main person behind promoting the fake news story in Politico that the New York Post report in October 2020 revealing the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop was a result of Russian disinformation.
The CNN announcement on Tuesday of Bertrand's promotion on X (which everyone still calls Twitter) went over like a lead balloon to the extent that CNN has had to limit responses to that post according to Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist.
CNN is limiting responses to this tweet announcing that it is rewarding Natasha "Fusion GPS" Bertrand for her work spreading the Russia collusion lie and for writing the story that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. https://t.co/BM4vPruFNk
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) February 14, 2024
Hemmingway also provided a reminder about Bertrand's nefarious fake news background in promoting the the fake Trump-Russia collusion Steele Dossier, a project of Fusion GPS which was financed by the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.
Never forget that Natasha "Fusion GPS" Bertrand funneled the Russia Collusion lie into print and also was the author of the disinformation op claiming America's intel experts said Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian. CNN now rewarding her for her propaganda with a promotion. https://t.co/BM4vPruFNk
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) February 13, 2024
Several commenters noted the irony of Bertrand being promoted by CNN at the same time that award winning journalist Catherine Herridge was fired by CBS.
Catherine Herridge gets canned and Natasha Bertrand gets promoted at CNN. They’re reshaping the MSM battlefield before the next election…
— Durham Monk in Seclusion (@DurhamMonk) February 14, 2024
For more detail as to the depths that CNN has plunged by not only hiring Bertrand in the first place but now promoting her, read Glenn Greenwald's no-holds-barred exposé in his April 27, 2021 substack, "CNN's New "Reporter," Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist."
A few scorching excerpts.
On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Bertrand's career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia's role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.
In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly thereafter, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN: the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist...
They wrote Bertrand was "no ordinary Russiagate fanatic."
There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post's media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims...
...It was also Bertrand who most effectively laundered the extremely significant CIA lie in October, 2020 that the documents obtained by The New York Post about the Biden family's business dealings in China and Ukraine were "Russian disinformation.” Even though the John-Brennan-led former intelligence officials admitted from the start that they had no evidence for this claim, Bertrand not only amplified it but vouched for its credibility by writing that the Post's reporting “has drawn comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump” (that those 2016 DNC and Podesta documents produced “few damaging revelations” would come as a big surprise to the five DNC operatives, led by Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who were forced to resign when their pro-Hillary cheating was revealed).
It was this Politico article by Bertrand that was then used by Facebook and Twitter to justify their joint censorship of the Post's reporting in the weeks before the 2020 election, and numerous media outlets — including The Intercept — gullibly told their readers to ignore the revelations on the ground that these authentic documents were "Russian disinformation.” Yet once it did its job of helping defeat Trump, that claim was debunked when even the intelligence community acknowledged it had no evidence of Russian involvement in the appearance of these materials, and Hunter Biden himself admitted he was the subject of a federal investigation for the transactions revealed by those documents.
No wonder CNN's ratings are in the toilet. They have destroyed any pretense towards credibility by rewarding Natasha Bertrand for her long history of promoting fake news -- but's all for the "right cause," destroying Donald Trump and electing Democrats instead.
