Is CNN really fake news?

So says our new president.

Donald Trump, in fact, uttered this accusation at a January news conference where he refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

I have more than a passing interest in the answer to this question.

Why?

Because, to borrow from my friends who attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, my name is Barry, and I am addicted to cable news. As are millions of Americans these days.

Not only am I addicted, but my drug of choice for years has been CNN.

I gravitated to CNN over the years because I like my news down the middle. Fox News gives us cheerleaders for the right-wing conservative crowd. MSNBC appeals mostly to the lefties. But CNN has, for the most part, tried to play it down the middle (though some hardcore conservatives may disagree).

What surprises me most about Trump's denouncements of CNN is that without CNN he likely wouldn't be president today.

For more than a year before the Nov. 8 election, CNN had essentially become TNN, the Trump News Network.

Think back to the Republican primaries. When do you remember a cable news network actually interrupting the news to cut live to stump speeches by presidential primary candidates?

Never.

Yet despite the fact that there were 16 or so other Republican candidates running — many of them experienced in government and with a far better handle on the issues — CNN decided to give an enormous amount of its airtime to Trump speeches and Trump tweets, followed by hour after hour of panels discussing the pros and cons of — guess whom? — Donald Trump.

It's not hard to understand why. Trump said outrageous things that pulled in millions of viewers (some who liked him, some who did not). Which meant higher ratings, which brought in more profits for Time Warner Inc., which owns CNN.

And like every other publicly owned company, Time Warner management's main objective is to "maximize shareholder value" by making piles of money.

No one knew this better than Trump, who played the news networks like a fiddle.

He got them ratings; they gave him maximum exposure. Without all of this free media, he could never have gotten his message out to enough voters to be taken seriously.

You'd think that Trump would be kissing CNN's corporate feet right now. Yet he insults its employees, probably in an attempt to (a) bully them into more favorable coverage and/or (b) dissuade his followers from believing anything CNN says about him (including — sorry, Don — the truth).

But back to my original question. Does CNN really put out fake news?

Here are some false things I've seen or heard about on CNN:

I heard Trump say that his recent executive order on immigration was not a ban on Muslims (yet CNN showed him give a campaign speech where he promised a "total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States").

I heard that Trump claimed there were thousands of Muslims cheering in the streets of New Jersey while the World Trade Center was burning (CNN says no credible evidence has ever been found of this having actually occurred).

I heard Trump say over and over in a campaign speech that Barack Obama was "the founder" of Islamic State (CNN pointed out that this was obviously false).

And finally, I heard that Trump said he would have won the popular vote if only millions of fraudulent votes hadn't been cast (all of them, coincidentally, for his opponent, he insisted in a recent interview). (CNN said that no objective, scientific study has ever found evidence of such massive voter fraud).

So CNN has broadcast a lot of untruths over the past year and a half — except that most of them were uttered (or tweeted) by Trump himself.

It seems that what Trump would like us to believe is that the real news is fake.

And if that drives us to get our news from far-right websites, talk radio and other news sources that trade in conspiracy theories and falsehoods? Well, that's what some of his followers are already doing.

Barry Rabin lives in Downingtown, Pa.

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