CNN host Dana Bash was slammed for lying on Tuesday about remarks made between former President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk during a conversation they had this week.
Bash played a deceptively edited clip from the X Space interview where Trump and Musk discussed some of the risks involved with nuclear energy, particularly if people are able to move back to areas where nuclear power-plants have had accidents.
The clip that Bash played for CNN viewers contained the following exchange:
MUSK: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re full cities again, so-
TRUMP: Right. Right. Right. That’s great.
MUSK: So, it’s not as scary as people think basically.
After Bash played the clip, she said that they were “sort of suggesting that what happened almost 80 years ago next year, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now it’s okay.”
OMG watch this clip.
CNN selectively cuts part of the Elon/Trump conversation about nuclear energy last night to make it seem like they were saying that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no big deal.
They are so dishonest! pic.twitter.com/z2ma1zJ6dJ
— MAZE (@mazemoore) August 13, 2024
Bash’s remarks were a blatant distortion of what Musk and Trump were discussing.
What really happened was Trump started talking about what he believed the greatest threat was to the U.S. and to the rest of the world, which he said was “not climate climate,” but the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“And when I talk about I’ll prevent World War III, I will,” Trump said. “But the truth is that you have to, because this is no longer army tanks going back and forth and shooting at each other. This a level of destruction and power that nobody’s ever seen before.”
At that point, Musk noted that the “bad side of nuclear” technology was “nuclear war,” but that there was also a good side to nuclear technology, which is “nuclear electricity generation.”
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“People have this fear of nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation,” Musk said. “It’s just a huge misunderstanding. And if you look at the injuries and deaths caused by, say … I’m not going to try to pick on coal mining, but just any kind of mining operation, and there’s a certain number of injuries and deaths per year. When you compare that to nuclear, nuclear is actually way better. So it is underrated as an electricity source, and I think it’s something that’s worth reconsidering, but there’s so much regulation that people can’t get it done.”
Trump and Musk both agreed that part of the problem was the branding surrounding the word “nuclear” and how fear around that word scares people away from embracing it.
Trump then talked about nuclear accidents that happened in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and in the former Soviet Union at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and how some have said that people will not be able to return to live in those areas for thousands of years.
“No, that’s not true,” Musk responded. “It’s actually not that bad. So after Fukushima happened in Japan, people were asking me in California, ‘Are we worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan?’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s crazy. It’s actually … It’s not even dangerous in Fukushima.’ I actually flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. And I donated a solar-powered system for a water treatment plant.”
Musk continued, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re full cities again, so it’s really not as scary as people think, basically.”
Bash’s framing of the U.S. using nuclear weapons to end WWII as being somehow morally reprehensible ignores the basic fact that historians, scientists, U.S. military officials, and even Japanese military officers from WWII have acknowledged that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan actually saved lives by bringing the war to a rapid conclusion instead of prolonging the fighting, which would have included the U.S. invading Japan and millions of people being killed — both American and Japanese.
Bash was slammed online for her deception from a variety of media personalities and even the Trump Campaign.
“Fake news CNN selectively edited President @realDonaldTrump and @elonmusk ‘s conversation last night to claim they said that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were not a big problem,” Trump said. “The full context shows they were talking about nuclear energy. All the fake news does is lie.”
Political commentator Anton Vuljaj posted on X: “Whether you like/dislike Trump doesn’t really matter…this is a pretty damning clip of CNN and explains why tens of millions of Americans have lost trust in the media.”
“What a joke,” said media analyst Joe Concha.
“This is terrible. It was obvious that @elonmusk was talking about how radiation declines over time,” said journalist Michael Shellenberger. “Some of the best research comes from Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Are you going to correct your misinformation and apologize, @DanaBashCNN?”
The House Republican Conference posted on X: “CNN is FAKE NEWS.”
