White House Pushes Blame For Coast Guard Exercise Panic To CNN

After police scanners picked up a report of “shots fired” in the Potomac River, close to where Pres. Obama was at the time, CNN ran a report that it tweeted out as “BREAKING NEWS”.

As it turned out, this was just a coast guard training exercise. As Jeanne Meserve, CNN’s homeland security correspondent, said on-air less than an hour after the CNN.com report, “You can be sure there that there’s going to be a lot of high level demand for answers.” Instead, the White House blamed CNN.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn’t hold back in blaming CNN. When explaining the Coast Guard would hold a press conference to explain what happened, Gibbs said, “Hopefully CNN will go…my only caution would be that before we report things like this, checking would be good.”

And Drudge wasted no time in piling on “The Most Trusted Name In News”:

While CNN was wrong to blast the breaking news tweet out, especially on 9/11 when the alarm would be so much more amplified, the training exercise was sure to cause confusion. The timing was especially stupid as well. To divert the blame squarely on CNN shows a theme with this administration – attack the media.

Just like the plane flyover in New York so Air Force One could pose for a cute picture, this boneheaded move shows a lack of responsibility by one single entity in the government. Pres. Obama and the White House were not to blame for that, and they shouldn’t be blamed today. But someone in the Coast Guard made a decision to simulate gunfire into an open police radio scanner, in an exercise supposedly taking place close to where the President was traveling – on September 11.

But yeah, let’s just blame the media. That plan always seems to work.

Here’s a clip of Meserve on CNN (edited, via Politico):