A new video from Project Veritas alleges media malfeasance during a CBS News segment on coronavirus testing at a Michigan hospital, but the news organization denies it was involved in staging the shot.
In a two-minute video posted to Twitter on Wednesday morning, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said medical professionals were asked to leave the Cherry Medical Center hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and line up their cars at the testing center outside their hospital in an effort to make it look busy for CBS News.
Some of the people in the video appeared to believe this happened at CBS News’s request.
CBS News President Susan Zirinsky said the assertion that the news organization created a fake testing line was “100% false,” but she also confirmed the health center acknowledged “at least one staffer” was told to get into the testing line with “real patients.”
“CBS News did not stage anything at the Cherry Health facility,” Zirinsky wrote in a statement. “Any suggestion to the contrary is 100% false. These allegations are alarming. We reached out to Cherry Health to address them immediately. They informed us for the first time that one of their chief officers told at least one staffer to get in the testing line along with real patients. No one from CBS News had any knowledge of this before tonight. They also said that their actions did not prevent any actual patients from being tested.”
The CBS News segment aired on Friday, May 1, and featured reporter Adriana Diaz describing long lines of people waiting to be tested for the virus.
O’Keefe’s Cherry Medical Center video showed what appeared to be multiple healthcare workers from the center, who described being instructed to make the line look “busy” for the media.
“We knew they were coming, but we had no clue that we’d have to do like fake patients,” said an unnamed source who Project Veritas identified as a registered nurse.
“We pretended … there were a couple real patients, which made it worse,” said a woman identified as infectious disease educator Alison Mauro-Lantz, who also expressed concern about prioritizing a news crew over actual patients.
“Apparently the news crew wanted more people in the line up because they knew it was scheduled,” added a person identified as cleaning site supervisor Nick Ross.
O’Keefe’s video also included segments from a sit-down interview with a “clinic insider” who said CBS News “100%” falsified the scene at Cherry Medical Center to amplify their coverage.
“So, the people in the cars are not patients?” O’Keefe said.
“Majority of them,” said the insider whose name and face was not revealed. “I do know, from talking with the testers that one, one of them, one or two of them were real patients, which added to their frustration because this line sat there for a while so they could organize the shot.”
Project Veritas’s undercover sting operations have been a subject of controversy over the years, including allegations of misleading and selective editing. In 2017, Project Veritas was caught attempting to disgrace the Washington Post by having a woman pose as a victim of then-Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in an effort to expose media hypocrisy.
Other times O’Keefe has seen success, including last November when he and Project Veritas released a video showing ABC News anchor Amy Robach complaining off-air about the network stopping her from interviewing an accuser of Jeffrey Epstein years before the wealthy financier was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors and found dead in his prison cell by apparent suicide. In a statement released by ABC News, Robach said the video “caught” her in “a private moment of frustration,” but she denied the network never told her to stop reporting on Epstein.
