WATCH: Joe Scarborough Asks Jake Tapper About Questionable Russian Bounty Story He Promoted

CNN’s Jake Tapper was challenged by MSNBC’s Morning Joe for amplifying reports of Russian bounties on the lives of U.S. troops, now that that intelligence has been called into question.

Tapper was on the show Thursday to promote The Devil May Dance, his newly-released historical novel about Hollywood in the 1960s. At one point in the conversation, Joe Scarborough asked Tapper to join him in reflecting on stories from the last few years, including “the stories we got wrong” and “the stories we followed that ended up not being 100 percent accurate.”

This led to Scarborough bringing up the reports from 2020 that Russian intelligence officers offered bounties to the Taliban in order to incentivize their efforts to kill U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Tapper was among those who gave air to the story ahead of the 2020 election, though the Biden administration has announced that the intelligence community only had “low to moderate confidence” in the bounty report.

“How do we do a better job?” Scarborough asked. “How do we be more fair to candidates, whether we’re talking about somebody like Hillary Clinton where we’re getting leaked information from intel communities that may not be accurate, or Donald Trump and Republicans?”

Tapper answered by saying journalists ought to remind news consumers that “people are innocent until proven guilty. A leak is not an indictment. An indictment is not a conviction.”

“And I think you’re right,” Tapper continued. “There are a lot of us in the media, and I don’t exempt myself, who should have or could have done a better job adding those caveats, making sure the people understood everything going on.”

Tapper went on to say that the “low to moderate confidence” assessment pertains to whether the bounty story can be proven true when it is subject to disagreement from multiple sectors of the intelligence community. Scarborough acknowledged Tapper’s point and agreed that “it is way past time” for journalists to pump the brakes when people are accused of a crime.

Watch above, via MSNBC.