As you've probably heard by now, President Donald Trump recently retweeted an animated GIF which highlights an appearance he made on a professional wrestling program. However, unlike the original version, which showed then-businessman Trump body-slamming the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, Vince McMahon, this edited version features McMahon as an anthropomorphic representation of CNN. The end result is a GIF that implies President Trump is "laying the smack down" on CNN, his apparent media nemesis.
Some may call this tweet by the President childish; others think it's funny. But it's pretty clear that CNN interpreted it as something altogether different: grounds for revenge.
Here's What Happened
CNN wasn't too happy about the GIF, which they interpreted as another salvo in their race to the bottom ongoing conflict with the POTUS. After doing a little internet sleuthing, CNN discovered that the GIF was first published to the popular internet site Reddit by a user named HanA**holeSolo (his user name is not censored on Reddit). On investigating his usage history, CNN allegedly determined that HanA**holeSolo had posted racist and anti-Semitic material to Reddit in the recent past. They didn't stop there, though; eventually, they figured out who the actual person behind the Reddit account was.
CNN's Andrew Kaczynski wrote:
Using identifying information that "HanA**holeSolo" posted on Reddit, KFile (CNN) was able to determine key biographical details, to find the man's name using a Facebook search and ultimately corroborate details he had made available on Reddit.
After figuring out who he was, CNN reporters then began calling and emailing the user. After enough harassment, HanA**holeSolo relented. CNN writes:
On Tuesday, "HanA**holeSolo" posted an apology on the subreddit r/The_Donald and deleted all of his other posts...
After posting his apology, "HanA**holeSolo" called CNN's KFile and confirmed his identity. In the interview, "HanA**holeSolo" sounded nervous about his identity being revealed and asked to not be named out of fear for his personal safety and for the public embarrassment it would bring to him and his family.
Some may call CNN's research into HanA**holeSolo a bit of a witch hunt, while others might see it simply as thorough investigative reporting. Fortunately, CNN answered the question definitively when reporter Andrew Kaczynski provided this bonus quote:
CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
My God, CNN.
This isn't rocket science, folks. In this great country of ours, everyone is free to make darn near any foolish and hurtful statement they so desire, provided they don't commit certain cardinal sins like perjury, libel, inciting a riot, etc. Certainly the flip side of that coin is that they may also suffer public backlash for their controversial speech, but that's the risk of flipping the coin in the first place. Regardless, people are allowed to make fools of themselves and hurt other people's feelings, and the news is allowed to talk about how they did so.
Had CNN revealed HanA**holeSolo's identity, they'd be guilty of nothing. But to wield their considerable power not as a means of informing the world about a matter of public interest but rather as a weapon to settle a personal score—or to extort some poor Internet dope into acquiescence—is the very epitome of an abuse of power, not altogether different than what they accuse Trump of engaging in when he employs his own brand of bully tactics.
Unfortunately, We See Big Companies Employ These Tactics All the Time
To summarize, CNN found something online that they felt was offensive and tracked the offending item back to a user on Reddit. They then identified the man behind the screen name and initiated contact with him. Scared for his well-being, he reached out to CNN, confirmed that they had the right guy, and then effectively kissed the ring so they would generously spare him from a digital tar-and-feathering. They gladly provided his pardon, but only if he promised to live according to the moral code they imposed upon him.
Yes, of course, the President himself is being childish and HanA**holeSolo may very well be terrible in his own right, but for CNN to climb down off its cross just long enough to swim in the gutter is really telling. Telling, but not surprising.
You see, in the world of personal injury litigation, nary a day goes without another example of big companies data mining for dirt, particularly against accident victims and their families. I probably tell at least one client a week about this phenomenon, and it's almost invariably met with skepticism. "Why would an insurance company (or a trucking company or my employer) care about what I do on social media?" The same reason CNN did what they did: leverage.
I am by no means anti-corporation. In fact, I find such notions patently absurd and sub-sophomoric. But I am very strongly opposed to the abuse of power in any form that it may take, be it at the hands of a president who's pretty clearly out of his depth or a CNN reporter who's struggling to match the President's free-fall velocity.
The Tweet That Destroyed Your Case
Let's apply this phenomenon to a truck accident. Imagine, for example, you were in a truck accident that left you badly injured. During your time of rest and recovery, you decide that you're upset with the trucking company and want to let everyone know about it. So, you register for a Twitter account and put your cat "Fluffy" as your avatar photo.
You then write how much you hate XYZ Trucking Company and how you wish that the CEO of that company would suffer as you have. Unfortunately, you also have pics of Fluffy on your Facebook profile and it doesn't take long before the trucking company figures out that you're the one who posted the tweet.
XYZ Trucking then chooses to interpret your tweet as a threat which they intend to bring up in court to sew seeds of doubt regarding your character into the psyche of the jury. This type of acting out could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Or even worse, it could be the last bit of doubt that the jury needs to sink your case altogether. Worse still, maybe you said something offensive.
Think about it for a second. CNN can't lock anyone in jail, nor can they make them pay a fine. But what they can do is bring to bear the incredible weight of public scrutiny, and before you know it you're a pariah. When the media does their job correctly they merely report the news and genuinely bad people get their comeuppance. In other instances they convict by implication (see Richard Jewel and the Atlanta Olympics Bombing or the Duke Lacrosse Rape fiasco as perfect examples).
While an insurance carrier defending a truck driver from a lawsuit brought by an injured person may indeed be less monolithic than CNN, they also only have to convince 12 jurors that the accident victim is the devil, rather than convince a large swath of the public. So in their own way, insurance carriers engage in this same kind of nonsense all the time. They take a shovel to the online persona of accident victims and dig until they can find something --however seemingly innocuous-- that they can use to assassinate the character the accident victim. CNN's offense is the same kind of tactic, only set loose on a larger audience.
Fortunately for people injury in accidents, however, with the help of a good truck accident lawyer, like my boss Michael Grossman, if someone comes at you with this kind of tactic you'll be encouraged to go for the throat rather than bend the knee.