CNN’s Oliver Darcy Calls Out Pro-Trump CNN Contributor for Labeling Charlottesville Reporting a ‘Lie’
CNN contributor Steve Cortes released a PragerU video in which he said the media practiced “journalistic malfeasance” in its reporting on President Donald Trump’s comments after the Charlottesville attacks. Fellow CNN employees — including media reporter Oliver Darcy — called out Cortes’ classification of the reporting.
“Media reported that President Trump described Nazis as ‘very fine people.’ Only, he didn’t,” said Cortes.
The conservative commentator said that when journalists get a fact wrong, know it’s wrong, and don’t correct it, as he believes they did with Charlottesville, it is “journalistic malfeasance.”
Darcy called it strange for Cortes to characterize the reporting this way when he is a paid CNN commentator.
Calling this a “malicious lie” (which it’s not) and “journalistic malfeasance” (which it’s also not) is a weird thing for someone who is a paid CNN commentator to say, given the network’s accurate reporting on the matter. https://t.co/lPwCHFlIZ4
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 5, 2019
Cortes pointed out that he had not mentioned CNN in the video. He had called on ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, New York Times, and Washington Post to apologize for spreading a “malicious lie.”
Oliver, I didn’t cite CNN at all in this video, though I did praise our network for accurate contemporaneous reporting in my prior article, link below.
And media, writ large, did indeed push a malicious lie, made clear by the whole transcript 1/2…https://t.co/LNFIrDd5uZ https://t.co/AXQy5qkD6U
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) August 5, 2019
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski called Cortes’ PragerU reporting “untrue.”
This isn’t true. Here’s an accurate article on the context: https://t.co/y1pnpGmhfO https://t.co/qEfmaXIubd
— andrew kaczynski? (@KFILE) August 5, 2019
Cortes had said that the “fine people” Trump was referring to were protesters who wanted to keep the Robert E. Lee statue standing.
“You also had some very fine people on both sides, you had people in that group that were protesting the taking down of to them, a very very important statue, and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name,” said Trump, according to Cortes. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally.”
The conservative pundit also argued that the president’s daughter and son-in-law are orthodox Jews, so obviously he would not condone neo-Nazis.
“The scandal of Charlottesville is not what President Trump said about neo-Nazis. It’s what the media said President Trump said about neo-Nazis,” Cortes said.
During the Charlottesville attack, a group had assembled to protest a Unite the Right rally. A neo-Nazi and white supremacist drove his car into the protest and killed one person.
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