CBS Pizzagate Truther Sure Is Fond Of His Former (?) Employer - RT
Ben Swann just cannot let go of Pizzagate, even for CBS News!
The Daily Beast's Ben Collins reports:
News anchor Ben Swann aired a six-minute “investigation” into Pizzagate in America’s ninth-largest TV market on Tuesday night.
“Media is telling you the entire story is a hoax or fake news, but what does that even mean?” Swann asked on the 11 p.m. newscast of Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. He was referring to the debunked conspiracy theory spread by 4chan and InfoWars that Clinton campaign chief John Podesta is connected to a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza shop that has no basement.
This isn't the first dubious report Swann has done for the Atlanta CBS affiliate:
Last month, in a CBS 46 “Reality Check” segment that went viral on Facebook, Swann asked “If (Syrian President Bashar al) Assad is Committing Genocide in Aleppo, Why Are People Celebrating in the Streets?” The segment has garnered over 67,000 shares on Facebook alone.
And he carried this conspiratorialism over from an earlier job:
In his last job at Russian state-TV outfit Russia Today in 2015, he reported that “any credible evidence does not seem to exist” that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, simply that it “fit the narrative the U.S. administration was hoping for.” On his own YouTube channel he said he had “major problems with the theory” that the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings were each conducted by “lone gunmen.”
“There’s a good reason to question this whole narrative: There’s been no evidence so far provided by police, other than what they’ve told us,” he said in his Sandy Hook truther video.
The Beast story refers to RT as Swann's "former employer." (Media Matters notes that he got the Atlanta CBS gig in June 2015.) But there's something curious about this. If you go to Swann's personal page, ben-swann.com, or to his benswanncommentary page on Facebook, you'll see that literally every entry ends with the following:
Read Full Article at RT.com
RT - Daily news
Links are included. If Swann is no longer cashing an RT paycheck, he's awfully nice to the people who are totally no longer employing him.
Swann also has a hell of a lot of stories about Vladimir Putin at ben-swann.com, including stories with headlines such as "Putin: Russian military not threatening anybody, we are protecting our borders" and "Putin demonized for thwarting neocon plan for global domination."
Swann posts a lot of dodgy material at his Truth in Media site. Here's a September 11 truther post titled "More Americans Are 'Rethinking' 9/11?" Here are several posts that are skeptical about vaccines. The Beast story tells us that Truth in Media
shares a contact phone number with a prominent member of the Republican Liberty Caucus, a tax-exempt 527 political committee....
The phone number listed under the contact section on Truth in Media’s website belongs to Joshua Cook, who previously used the same number as a contact for South Carolina’s Republican Liberty Caucus in the political organization’s press releases....
Cook was the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Liberty Caucus as recently as 2014, and he is currently listed as a committee member on RLC’s national website. Cook has written more than 500 articles on Truth in Media’s website since Swann founded it in 2013, while serving as RLC’s South Carolina chairman or national committee member.
In 2013, the Republican Liberty Caucus posted an interview with Swann on its website titled “RLC Joins Forces with Ben Swann’s Truth in Media Project.”
Swann also did a vaccine truther segment for a previous employer, RBN, which employed Swann as a radio host. RBN's site still hosts this video: