Hooray for the Fourth Estate!
CNN’s Jake Tapper invented a new standard of fact-checking this weekend to wriggle out of having to correct Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she repeated the lie that President Trump called the COVID-19 virus pandemic a “hoax.”
Some falsehoods deserve to go unchallenged, the cable news host explained Sunday, adding that to provide a fact-check would fail to serve the larger purpose of “taking a stand defining the truth.”
So, is this an apple or a banana? I can’t tell anymore.
“We’re hearing it every step of the way from this administration,” Ocasio-Cortez said during her appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. “First, we’re hearing it was a hoax. Then we were hearing that everything was fine.”
The president never called it a “hoax.” This is a lie that has been debunked already by multiple news outlets, including the Washington Post, CBS News, FactCheck, and, of course, the Washington Examiner.
Here is what Trump actually said about the virus during a campaign rally in late February: “Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus … one of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. And this is their new hoax.”
You would never know the president said this, however, from watching State of the Union, where Tapper made no effort this weekend to correct the record after Ocasio-Cortez repeated “hoax” falsehood.
Shortly after the congresswoman’s appearance on CNN, a member of the Trump campaign’s rapid response team shared a clip of the interview on social media, noting the CNN host’s failure to do even the bare minimum expected of his profession.
This is where it gets good.
Tapper responded Sunday to the Trump campaign staffer, explaining he declined to correct the record with Ocasio-Cortez because Trump is also guilty of telling coronavirus-related falsehoods.
“I thought about it,” the host tweeted, referring to why he did not fact-check his guest when she parroted a known falsehood, “because the president did not call the virus a hoax. But [I] didn’t because he did call a hoax the concerns of those saying that the response from the president was insufficient and that he was downplaying the gravity of the crisis. And that too was a lie.”
Tapper added, “I guess that’s the problem with a politician who lies so often; while I agree that Democrats are mischaracterizing what he said, what he did say was also false, so it’s tough to justify taking the time for a fact check when it’s not taking a stand defining the truth.”
The host then attempted to redirect his social media following to a segment of his show featuring FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor, who said he could not give “a rough number” on the number of medical masks the federal government has acquired to send to hospitals.
Quick thinking, Jake!
For a moment there, it looked like you were going to have to fact-check Ocasio-Cortez. But you were able to get out of it, and all you had to do was create a new standard of journalism from thin air.
That was a close one!
