The State Department accused CBS News of intentionally deceived its viewers about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Morgan Ortagus, the State Department spokeswoman, said 60 Minutes “failed to accurately portray the clear intent” of Pompeo’s remarks about the origin of the coronavirus.
CBS News “intentionally misled its viewers with a report Sunday evening that failed to accurately portray the clear intent of Secretary Pompeo’s remarks to Martha Raddatz on ABC News regarding the origin of the virus in Wuhan, China. They failed, too, to air his comments to the press from last Wednesday that provided even more clarity on the issue,” Ortagus tweeted late Sunday night.
.@CBSNews intentionally misled its viewers with a report Sunday evening that failed to accurately portray the clear intent of Secretary Pompeo’s remarks to Martha Raddatz on ABC News regarding the origin of the virus in Wuhan, China.
— Morgan Ortagus (@statedeptspox) May 11, 2020
“This reporting — intending to deceive — seeks to obfuscate the Secretary’s core point: the Chinese Communist Party continues to refuse calls for transparency, thereby compounding its cover-up, and further risking American lives,” she continued.
CBS News took an excerpt from Pompeo’s recent interview on ABC News’s This Week in which the secretary of state announced he had seen “enormous evidence” showing the coronavirus outbreak originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The 60 Minutes package included that clip with the narrator explaining that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees and coordinates the 17 different U.S. spy offices and agencies, ruled that the “virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”
“The same day Pompeo tried to have it both ways, President Trump repeated the theory of a Chinese lab accident,” said the narrator, who called Pompeo’s theory “debunked.” “The administration has offered no evidence of an accident or genetic engineering.”
Ortagus also took exception for the network not including Pompeo saying there was no disagreement between him and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said that “a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists” believe that the virus “evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
“There’s no separation,” Pompeo told reporters last week. “We’re all trying to figure out the right answer. We’re all trying to get to clarity. There are different levels of certainty assessed at different places. That’s highly appropriate. People stare at data sets and come to different levels of confidence.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also weighed in on social media on Monday morning.
“60 Minutes on CBS is the second example in 24 hours of completely dishonest editing, this time of @SecPompeo,” she tweeted. “CBS cut out the portion of Pompeo’s remarks where he clearly acknowledges that he agrees with the intelligence community assessment.”
CBS News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
