Bias Alert: CNN Outright Changed Trump Quote On 'Profiling'

Zach Montanaro | September 20, 2016
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Things have gotten pretty lopsided in the media lately, with media outlets openly criticizing Republican nominee Donald Trump for using the word “bomb” in reference to Saturday's bombings in New York and New Jersey. An MSNBC host even said that we were “lucky” the attacker used explosives and not guns.

Now, we are apparently at a point where media outlets are openly changing direct quotes as well.

CNN ran headlines throughout the Monday news cycle claiming that Trump was calling for “racial profiling” in response to the bombings that took place over the weekend. The problem, of course, is that he never said that.

Here is the full quote that Trump said to Fox News:

You know in Israel, they profile. They've done an unbelievable job -- as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they'll profile. They profile. They see somebody that's suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in. They will check out.

CNN, however, apparently didn’t think that was juicy enough and decided to literally put words in Trump’s mouth. Here’s a screenshot of the headline CNN ran:

CNN also ran headlines like this on their website, as well.

If that wasn’t bad enough, CNN also played clips from Trump's interview and framed them in such a way to make it look like Trump was answering questions specifically about racial profiling.

Now as you can see in the quote above, Trump never once said “racial” anywhere. Even in an interview with Bill O’Reilly later that same day, Trump again spoke of profiling the Israeli way:

It works. If we see somebody that we think could be a problem at airports and other places you talk to them and you see what’s going on. We don’t do that. Not much.

Again, no “racial profiling” anywhere to be found.

It would have been one thing for CNN to take the context of the quote and speculate on the meaning of it. It is quite another thing to literally change a quote entirely and attribute it to someone who never said anything like it.

It’s like they aren’t even trying to hide their bias anymore.

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