CNN Activist Jim Sciutto is the Newest Duranty-Blair Laureate, for Recycling Fake News (i.e., a Hoax) that Had Already been Debunked Months Earlier; Congratulations, Jim!

By Nicholas Stix
Grammatical corrections made at 6:04 p.m., on Sunday, June 11, 2017.

On Wednesday, May 24, I saw a CNN roundtable of activists doing the usual—trashing President Trump.

Jim Sciutto showed a clip of Sen. Al Franken asking witness Sen. Jeff Sessions if the latter had had any contact with the Russians, and Sessions saying no.

In an attempt to insinuate that Sessions had perjured himself, Sciutto then pointed out that Sessions had indeed met with the Russians during the transition.

What Sciutto didn’t say was that Jeff Sessions had not met with the Russians in his capacity as a member of the Trump team, which was the point of Franken’s question, and that he had only met with the Russians in his function as U.S. senator at the behest of then-President Barack “Obama.”

The fake news story, whereby Sessions had “perjured” himself had been debunked months ago, yet Sciutto hoped either that CNN viewers were too lazy to know, had forgotten, or didn’t care about the truth.

It’s bad enough promoting a hoax, but I don’t know quite what to call someone who revives a hoax.

This is Jim Sciutto’s first Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, but something tells me it won’t be his last. His CNN colleagues Symone Sanders, Don Lemon, and Kate Bolduan preceded him in perfidy.

Previous Duranty-Blair winners are:

• CBS News producer Mary Mapes in 2004;

• seven reporters and editors at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2006;

• ABC News reporter Brian Ross in 2012;

• Peter Berger (not the brilliant sociologist), of The American Interest, in 2013;

• Associated Press operative Tom Hays, in 2014;

• New York Times operative Farhad Manjoo in September, 2016;

• CNN’s Symone Sanders (2), Don Lemon, and Kate Bolduan (2), in November 2016; and

• New York Times Propaganda Officer Francis X. Clines in March 2017.


The Duranty-Blair Award recognizes those journalists whose work embodies the spirit of Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, two of the most notorious journalists in the history of the Fourth Estate. It is no accident that both men worked for the New York Times.

Walter Duranty wrote a series of early 1930s dispatches from the Soviet Union, where he was Times Moscow bureau chief, in which he lied about the Ukrainian Holocaust, in which Stalin deliberately starved millions of Kulaks (farmers) to death, through a man-made famine. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty reported that the peasants were happy and well-fed, and was rewarded for his lies with a Pulitzer Prize.

Jayson Blair (here, here, and here) was an early 2000s black affirmative action hire, who alternately plagiarized reporters at other newspapers, and fabricated articles out of whole cloth, all for stories set hundreds and even thousands of miles away, while he sat in New York City cafés.

In 2004, CBS News producer Mary Mapes sought to win the presidential election for socialist Democrat challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by perpetrating a hoax, various dubbed “Memogate” and “Rathergate,” using forged Texas Air Force National Guard documents, provided by Bush-hating former reserve officer Bill Burkett, charging future president George W. Bush with going AWOL during the Vietnam War.

In 2006, New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, won for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage, black violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of that year (1,900-word version; two-part, 3,900-word version (here and here); and 9,900-word version).

In 2012, “ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent” Brian Ross won for his 2002 campaign, on behalf of the Justice Department/FBI, to railroad innocent weapons scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the fall, 2002 anthrax murders; and for falsely asserting, in 2012, that Aurora, CO movie theater mass murderer, James Holmes, was a member of the TEA Party.

In 2013, Peter Berger, of The American Interest, was recognized for his support of, and cover-up of the ongoing genocide against South African whites.

In 2014, AP reporter Tom Hays won for his 2004 “Boosgate” hoax. In his contribution to the John Kerry for President campaign, Hays had fabricated an incident out of whole cloth, in which Republican voters at a Bush re-election rally “booed” news from President Bush II, of President Clinton’s illness.

In September 2016, New York Times operative Farhad Manjoo became a Duranty-Blair laureate, in recognition of his perfidy, as an unofficial Hillary Clinton operative, in calling on Google to censor stories which covered Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s health problems, and which raised questions about her physical fitness for the highest office in the land.

In November 2016, CNN’s Symone Sanders (2), Don Lemon, and Kate Bolduan (2) became Duranty-Blair laureates for promoting post-election hate crime hoaxes.

Finally, in March 2017, the New York Times’ Francis X. Clines was recognized for his yeoman work back in 2001, when he applied propagandistic alchemy, in order to transform the 2001, Cincinnati riot from an orgy of violent black racism against whites into a non-violent exercise in righteous black indignation.