Even in trivial matters, CNN has fudged the truth and always in a predictably biased direction—as, for example, in its selective viewing of a video that suggested Trump buffoonishly had preempted the Japanese Prime Minister and overfed fish during a joint photo-op (“Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.”). In truth, Trump simply followed the feeding model of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Earlier, CNN had reported that singer Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the music of her father Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”—a story of her purported anger that Sinatra denied. During the lead-up to the Neil Gorsuch nomination announcement, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny inaccurately announced that the Trump White House was purportedly “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest” by creating two “identical Twitter pages” for both possible nominees Justices Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman. Later Zeleny sheepishly retracted that falsehood.

The shoddiness in reporting about Trump and the occasional flat-out inaccurate new stories reflect a toxic network culture in which partisanship is now standard and apparently to be expected. A certain furor over Trump often erupts in repeated, obscene anti-Trump and unprofessional outbursts of CNN journalists, contributors, and anchors—whether Anderson Cooper trashing a pro-Trump panelist by profanely retorting, “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!” or CNN religious scholar Reza Aslan referring to Trump as “this piece of sh-t,” or perhaps the late CNN host Anthony Bourdain joking in an interview about poisoning Trump or CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin’s infamous photo-pose holding a facsimile of Trump’s severed head.