Chastened By Covington Failure, CNN To Reserve Bad Hot Takes For Israel

“We’re still going to take Palestinian allegations of war crimes or atrocities at face value and maybe ask questions later, but probably not.”

Washington, January 23 – Three days after botching its coverage of a silent teenager confronted by a yelling, drum-beating provocateur, a major news organization has decided to cut back on its knee-jerk assumptions regarding causes it opposes, and from now on will restrict its automatic, context-free demonizing to Israeli actions.

Cable News Network, among several other major outlets such as the Washington Post, provided uncritical amplification to allegations that a white adolescent attending a demonstration in the capital had heaped verbal abuse on a Native American veteran of the armed forces, a story that accompanied partial video evidence and accusations of xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy. However, the uncut video and other recorded accounts exonerated the teen and revealed that the boy and his group behaved politely and quietly in the face of provocation by the native activist and others in the vicinity. CNN spent more than a day insisting on the accuracy of its version of the episode, but backtracked Monday and Tuesday in the face of overwhelming evidence it had botched the story. As a result, network executives announced Wednesday, the news team will bring greater discernment and prudence to its reporting, except when it comes to Israel, where immediate, uncritical acceptance of anti-Israel allegations will remain the default mode.

“We made a mistake,” conceded CNN personality Jake Tapper. “Instead of issuing immediate corrections to our account of the incident with Mr. Philips and the Covington High School teen, we continued to double down on the anti-conservative narrative even as indications mounted that our hot take was too hot to be true. Our team is now examining ways in which we can improve our coverage of emerging stories that stir controversy, at least here. As far as our coverage of Israel and the Israeli military is concerned, we’re still going to take Palestinian allegations of war crimes or atrocities at face value and maybe ask questions later, but probably not.”

Media analyst Al Betzaroff explained that a chastened CNN seeks to return to surer journalistic territory. “No one ever expects the news about Israel to be accurate, at least not in CNN’s world,” he noted. “The more it fits into preconceived notions of Jews-bad, Arabs-victims, the better. What they discovered over the weekend is that the ‘progressive’ hot-take model that serves Israel-bashing so well is not applicable in the same way anymore to other pet causes of the left-leaning media, for various reasons. At least they can fall back on it for Mideast coverage, though.”

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