Jake Tapper, the prominent CNN journalist, lied yesterday on X. He insinuated that young pro-Palestine protesters were “antisemitic,” while continuing to hide his network’s bias.
Jake Tapper, the prominent CNN journalist, lied yesterday on X. Pro-Palestinian protesters had confronted his CNN colleague Dana Bash at a literary event in Washington, D.C., and he told his 3 million followers that they had “targeted” her because she is “Jewish.” We’ll get to the specifics of this incident shortly, but first let’s remind Tapper that he and CNN continue to ignore a shocking exposé in the British Guardian newspaper last February that showed that the U.S. cable outlet’s bias about reporting Israel’s war on Gaza is not a series of uncoordinated accidents, but a conscious and complex policy directed from the very top of the network.
The Guardian’s reporter, Chris McGreal, got 6 network insiders in multiple CNN newsrooms to talk anonymously, and he also got his hands on “more than a dozen internal memos and emails.” Here was the first sentence of his article:
“CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.”
Here’s more:
“. . . daily news decisions are set by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict guidelines on coverage.
“They include tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value.
Then, even more extraordinary:
“In addition, every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.”
You might have expected that the Guardian’s astonishing exposé would have prompted significant coverage in the U.S. But, in the week following the article:nothing. Nothing in the New York Times; nothing on National Public Radio; nothing in the Washington Post; nothing on National Public Radio; nothing on the PBS News Hour. And of course nothing on CNN itself, not even an effort to refute the charges.
Let’s be clear; the Guardian is not a fringe, alternative newspaper. It is 203 years old, arguably Britain’s best mainstream publication, and in recent years it has been expanding its coverage into the United States.
Back to Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. Tapper’s tweet included a 2 minute and 14 second video of two women protesters who, one after the other, jumped up and yelled at Bash, (at an event where she was launching her book on an unrelated subject). They shouted about genocide, and Palestinian prisoners, and criticized CNN’s coverage. Only a couple of sentences could have raised questions. The second protester shouted: “You want millions from Zionists. From AIPAC. Your home is worth millions.” (AIPAC of course is the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. A report in the Forward quoted the organization’s denial that they pay Bash.)
But where’s the anti-Semitism? AIPAC does give millions — not to journalists like Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, but to pro-Israel political candidates; the organization has donated an estimated $100 million so far this year, and helped unseat two pro-Palestine House members: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Pointing out the lobbying group’s outsized influence is not anti-Jewish, but simple accuracy. Instead, if you Google “Jake Tapper/AIPAC,” you will get no results. Surely instead of slandering these young women to millions of his followers Tapper should start to report at length on AIPAC’s influential interventions in our political life?
The young protesters were unquestionably disruptive, and their tactics were probably not the best way to win people over. But they’ve almost certainly spent nearly the entire past year seeing horrifying videos from Gaza of slaughtered and dismembered Palestinian children — scenes that will never appear on CNN, or even be accurately and fully reported there.
And Dana Bash has been one of the more biased pro-Israel journalists on CNN. Younger people especially may remember how back in May she actually comparedthe U.S. campus protests to the rise of Hitler’s Germany: “[The protests are] . . . hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe. And I do not say that lightly. The fear among Jews in this country is palpable right now.” Did Tapper criticize his colleague for implying that the student protesters were modern-day Nazis?
That said, it’s unfair to single out Bash. That Guardian report last February explained convincingly how her network’s coverage of Israel/Palestine is rigged from the very top. Jake Tapper found time to make the false charge that the protesters disrupted Bash’s event because she is “Jewish.” Will he ever get around to reporting about the documented systematic bias at his own network?
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