On Sunday, CNN’s Brian Stelter criticized The Washington Post, New York Times and NBC about their retracting of stories regarding Rudy Giuliani after federal investigators raided his apartment last week.
The three outlets were forced to publicly retract their earlier false reporting that the FBI warned both Giuliani and One America News Network that they were being used in order to spread Russian disinformation.
On his show, “Reliable Sources,” Stelter broke down how the outlets were misled by their sources and that they had to retract their false stories soon after, calling it a “major black eye.”
Stelter said that “[T]he new story is that FBI planned to warn Rudy and OAN they might be used as Russian puppets, but they didn’t actually deliver the warning.”
Oliver Darcy, CNN’s senior media reporter, joined Stelter, and clarified the way newsrooms use the screening process when deciding on publishing information from anonymous sources, and said that the process can still be susceptible to human error and that these sources can be wrong.
Darcy explained that “[I]n 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.”
Stelter added that incidents like this is what helps to discredit the media, saying that “a bogus report of this magnitude allows bad faith actors” to lump media outlets that try to get it right with outlets that don’t care.
Source: Newmax
