In a page out of U.S. President Donald Trump’s book, a Libyan TV station has attacked CNN for a report on the news network about slavery in the country.
Last week, CNN revealed an investigation containing a video showing at least 10 people being auctioned off like slaves for around $400 each. Libyan government officials have said there will be a committee to investigate the slave auctions, as it called for help from the global community on the country’s migrant and refugee influx.
But TV channel Libya 218 appeared to take exception to the coverage from CNN. On Monday, it used Trump’s Twitter attacks on CNN to discredit the story.
One of Trump’s tweet read: “Outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly. The outside world does not see the truth from them!”
Libya 218 suggested that CNN had ulterior and political motives.
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“Here the possibility arises that the channel has published the report of slavery in Libya to secure an as yet hidden political objective,” the Guardian reported the channel as saying.
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In an online article on the subject, the media station lists a variety of reasons why CNN is unprofessional but doesn’t comment on CNN’s investigation of slavery specifically.
“Aside from going into the details of the CNN report, we would like to present to you the most prominent fallout of the professional channel, which has caused it great embarrassment,” a translation of the site from Google reads.
In the list of embarrassing content, Libya 218 says CNN broadcast 30 minutes of pornographic content by accident. That is an internet myth that has been debunked by Snopes.com.
It also listed a June 2017 incident in which three CNN reporters resigned after the network retracted a story about the U.S. investigation into Russian meddling during the 2016 election. The story was removed because it didn’t meet “editorial standards.”
The Libyan TV station isn’t the first to take on Trump’s stance on the mainstream media and run with it.
Other world leaders have also called news stories that appear negative as “fake news.” Just last month, Filipino President Roger Duterte said he was “demonized” by “fake news” for their coverage of his war on drugs.
The rise of authorities deriding the media as “fake news” is alarming to the United Nations, since it increases the “risk of threats and violence against journalists, undermines public trust and confidence in journalism as a public watchdog, and may mislead the public by blurring the lines between disinformation and media products containing independently verifiable facts,” a declaration written by the UN and other watchdogs in early 2017 read.
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