CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy on Sunday went to bat for legacy media outlets, like The Washington Post and The New York Times, sayi...
CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy on Sunday went to bat for legacy media outlets, like The Washington Post and The New York Times, saying there are “layers of protection” in place to keep “bogus” stories from being printed.
The duo’s defense comes after the papers of record, along with NBC News, had to issue retractions for a story being false. A report that first came out in The Washington Post claimed the FBI warned Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani about the Russians attempting to use him to influence the 2020 election.
The segment was in response to One America News Network President Charles Herring asking how mainstream media outlets allegedly confirm anonymous sources’ stories yet they still report “fake news.”
“Let’s be clear, Brian. These aren’t ‘fake sources,’ like Herring is saying. In fact, the news organizations, they know, like you said, exactly who these anonymous sources are,” Darcy explained. “When a reporter gets information from an anonymous source, they go to their editor, they look at this person. They vet them and they say, ‘How does this person know this information that they’re giving us? Are they a credible source? Do we have other sources who can confirm what they’re saying?’ And, if all those things check out, they might go forward and report the information, like what happened in this case.”
“That said, there are safeguards. There is human error. The safeguards only work so much,” Darcy said. “So, sometimes sources will get things wrong and the news organizations report the information, hear back from the source, and they learn that the information wasn’t correct. And, in this case, that appears to be what has happened with all of these news organizations.”
“The bottom line is there are safeguards in place. Unfortunately, human error is still at play and news organizations sometimes do get burned like this,” Darcy concluded.
According to Stelter, the difference between news outlets are those that “try to get it right and outlets that don’t give a damn.”
“Obviously, outlets at The Post do try. As you’re saying, they have layers of oversight, ethics guidelines, and corrections processes and yet a bogus report of this magnitude allows bad-faith actors to lump them in with like mydogsblog.com and, you know, ends up tarring all of the media,” Stelter said.
According to Darcy, the outlets were “responsible” when they discovered the “error.”
“They owned up to it. They issued corrections,” Darcy said. He slammed “MAGA media” – the Left’s nickname for conservative news sites – as those who “do everything they can to avoid issuing corrections, to own up to their mistakes, and sometimes it seems like they’re intentionally, you know, promoting falsehoods and moving on.”
It’s amazing that Darcy and Stelter are going to lecture about news organizations’ “safeguards” and getting stories correct. For two years, CNN was one of the outlets that repeatedly told us President Donald Trump colluded with Russia. When Special Counsel Robert Mueller came in and investigated, he found that no collusion took place, which destroyed the Left’s collusion narratives. Did CNN, The New York Times, or The Washington Post issue corrections? No. They wrote another article with Mueller’s findings, as if the narrative they pushed was no big deal. There were no corrections. There were no apologies. They simply shrugged and moved on.
It’s hard to say there are “safeguards” when completely false stories are written, produced, and published, especially when it happens repeatedly.
They can blame these egregious stories on “human error” but that fails to take into account political aspirations and leanings. Most of the anti-Trump stories, especially those surrounding the former president’s allies, are because of the media’s disdain for Trump. It was never about reporting the fact. It was about taking down Trump.
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