‘It Definitely Does Damage’: CNN’s Stelter and Panel Call Out Steve Scully Lying About Twitter Hack

CNN’s Brian Stelter and his latest Reliable Sources panel agreed that Steve Scully and the Commission on Presidential Debates suffered a blow to their credibility in light of the C-SPAN director’s false hacking debacle.

On Sunday, Stelter broke down Trump’s latest attacks on the media by dissecting the president’s latest complaints about NBC’s Savannah Guthrie (who moderated Trump’s town hall), and Kristen Welker (who will moderate the final 2020 presidential debate). As Stelter discussed this with TIME’s Charlotte Alter and The Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, they turned to the subject of Scully’s suspension from C-SPAN.

As Stelter noted, Scully was supposed to moderate the 2nd debate between Trump and Joe Biden, but it was eventually cancelled and Scully has now been suspended for admitting that he lied when he claimed his Twitter account was hacked in connection with an unflattering Trump tweet. To all of this, Stelter asked Shachtman, “How much damage does this do to the national news media as a whole when you have a prominent journalist admitting to lying under pressure?”

Shachtman began by saying Scully is “not the first prominent journalist to lie about some tweet he was no longer proud of” and “not the first prominent journalist to claim to have been hacked and then not.” This may or may not have been a reference to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who dubiously claimed in 2018 that hackers were responsible for unearthed, homophobic comments on her blog.

From there, Shachtman continued by saying “it’s really got to stop” with journalists coming up with “ridiculous” explanations to try avoiding accountability for their errors.

“Yeah, it definitely does damage,” Stelter agreed.

Watch above, via CNN.