BUT OF COURSE THEY DO. CNN attacks Associated Press report on Hillary’s Clinton Foundation meetings:

Keep in mind, Byers is blasting the AP for putting out a misleading tweet which didn’t give readers a clear understanding of what the story actually said. And yet here he is not giving his own readers a clear understanding of what the the Post’s Fact-Checker said. It’s the same mistake. Byers continues:

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias was more direct: “The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess,” his headline read.

And that’s all the evidence Byers offers that the AP botched its report, one link to a progressive news site. Even the expert Byers quoted earlier in the piece says Yglesias is overplaying his hand:

Boardman argued that the story itself “was not nearly so flawed as Yglesias and others have charged.”

Byers deserves credit for including the quote undercutting Vox in his piece but, looking at the material he assembled for this story, the entire piece could just as easily have been framed as ‘the AP botched a tweet but not the underlying report.’ It’s what the journalism dean told him. It’s what the Post’s Fact-Checker seemed to say. I understand reporters often don’t write their own headlines but then they probably don’t write their own tweets either. The headline of Byers’ piece is every bit as bad as the AP tweet he is blasting for inaccuracy.

And CNN’s young successor to Howard Kurtz is playing palace guard as well: Stelter Attacks AP for Exposing Clinton Foundation Donor Access to State Department.

As with creating “The Wright-Free Zone” to keep Obama afloat in 2008 and Candy Crowley sabotaging Mitt Romney during his debate with Obama four years later, this is simply what the propaganda wing of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO does for their party during every election year.