CNN’s Brian Stelter knocked the Washington Post, New York Times and NBC over their retracted stories about Rudy Giuliani following the raid on his apartment by federal investigators.
The three outlets were forced to make public corrections over the weekend after falsely reporting that the FBI warned Giuliani and One America News Network they were being targeted by a scheme to spread Russian disinformation. Stelter called it “a major black eye” on Sunday’s Reliable Sources as he broke down how the three outlets were misled by their sources and retracted their reports shortly after.
“The 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,” Stelter summed up.
Stelter was joined by CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy, who outlined the screening process newsrooms use when deciding whether to publish information from anonymous sources. Darcy acknowledged that these safeguards are vulnerable to “human error,” and “sometimes, sources will get something wrong.”
“In this case, that appears to be what has happened with all of these news organizations,” Darcy said. “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.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mediaite