Jake Tapper’s Smear of Rashida Tlaib Is Worse Than You Think

They say, “Journalism’s not a crime” — and it’s not. But when Big Western News Brands lie and slander, they hardly ever face any consequences. And that’s a big threat to democracy.

After libeling an elected member of Congress on international television earlier this week, Jake Tapper has not been fired. He has not been suspended. He tweeted away on X Wednesday, including firing shots at the racist comments of Republican congressman Clay Higgins and reposting CNN’s latest Emmy wins, as if his conduct a few days ago was a distant memory. In television land, it soon will be. But what Tapper did and the fact that CNN let it happen is indicative of an ongoing cancer in journalism that no one seems to want to acknowledge.

To briefly recap, Tapper slandered Palestinian-American Representative Rashida Tlaib, accusing her of antisemitism. Tlaib had criticized Michigan’s attorney general Dana Nessel over her charging 11 pro-Palestine demonstrators. People have the right to protest, argued Tlaib, but Nessel seemed to have decided to treat the issue of Palestine differently and in a biased way.

CNN viewers were told something quite different, and Zeteo has done an admirable timeline that breaks down exactly how the smear unfolded. In case you feel lazy and don’t want to check Zeteo, Tapper asked Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer on State of the Union, “Do you think Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job? Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protestors are not — that’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?”

What I personally find bizarre is that minutes before he smeared Tlaib, Tapper read out her exact words which appeared simultaneously on screen, and in no way are they in the same ballpark as his accusation. The controversy mushroomed large enough that journalist Steve Neavling — who conducted the original interview with Tlaib that started the whole thing — made several tweets to counter the false claims and went to the trouble of writing an article about it. Tlaib “never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.”

CNN was not interested. Tapper’s fellow anchor Dana Bash then repeated the smear the next day, referring to “a Democratic congresswoman’s accusation that the state’s Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job.” Here’s a pro-tip on Slander 101: you can still slander or libel someone without saying their name, as long as it’s generally understood who the hell you’re talking about.

By then there was mounting outrage from left-wing and media watching sites such as The Intercept. So, Bash had to back-pedal, announcing a “clarification.” She now admitted, “Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity” — before slipping in that “Nessel still says she believes [the comment] is antisemitic and repeated on CNN yesterday that ‘Clearly, she’s referencing my religion.”

This “sorry, not sorry” was disingenuous at best. At worst — it was still potentially actionable. Another aspect of basic libel and slander is that you’re not necessarily protected just because you couch the libel in attribution.

It wasn’t until that same evening that Tapper made his own retreat on air. During an interview with Nessel, he said, “I should note that I misspoke yesterday when asking a follow up of Governor Whitmer who I asked about this. I was trying to characterize your views of Tlaib’s comments.” The interview was a perfect chance for Tapper to disentangle himself, and Nessel obliged him by making a fresh charge: “Rashida Tlaib is an individual who is well known for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are antisemitic in nature.”

Problem solved. CNN got to keep its narrative of condemning Tlaib. It was simply a matter of shifting the attribution — and the blame.

No wonder that The New Republic has called Tapper’s and Bash’s defense “pathetic.”

But those who have closely followed the Gaza Crisis know that CNN has been one of the most egregious propagandists for Netanyau’s war. When The Guardian did an investigation on the network’s coverage back in February, one staffer said, “The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel. Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.”

CNN management set “tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value. In addition, every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.”

But nothing changed with these revelations. By early May when pro-Palestine demonstrations on the UCLA campus grabbed headlines, Dana Bash made false claims even as the evidence contradicted her while the segment aired. “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other,” Bash read over clips, “hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.” Yet moments later, CNN’s own Stephanie Elam noted that the violence on campus on April 30 was instigated by a pro-Israeli mob.

CNN’s mischaracterization was perpetuated in its subsequent coverage. All it took was a little creative word choice and omitting inconvenient details. “The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago,” reported Camila Bernal on May 3, “but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least fifteen injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers.”

FAIR’s Julie Hollar zeroed in on the clear holes in the coverage. “Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used ‘what appeared to be rubber bullets,’ but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.”

As for Tapper, he’s been openly contemptuous of the campus protests, complaining in late April how “this is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza or what is going on with the International Criminal Court talking about maybe bringing charges.” And he isn’t above hyperbole, as Michael F. Brown of The Electronic Intifada pointed out. Tapper declared on air recently that Hamas had murdered “thousands of civilians” on October 7, 2023. In fact, as horrific as the attack was with Hamas taking around 240 hostages, it actually killed 1,200 Israelis, with a quarter of them being soldiers and police officers.

No one should be terribly surprised that Big Media in the UK as well as in Canada have been carrying Netanyahu’s water and offering similar reportage that’s brazenly lopsided. In June, William Dalrymple, the author of bestselling histories of India and an open supporter of Palestine, tweeted: “Hamas has accepted Biden peace proposal. Netanyahu has turned it down. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the BBC’s headline, which yet again seems to have been written by the Israeli Embassy or a lobbying group in their employ.” The BBC headline he referred to read: “No Gaza ceasefire until Israel war aims achieved, Netanyahu says.” Dalrymple had a point. The story didn’t get to the most crucial news development — that Hamas was actually accepting the brokered deal — until its third paragraph.

Just as in the U.S. where the story that Jewish students felt “unsafe” on campuses, so the angle was picked up by Canadian reporters when covering the protests at the University of Toronto. Just as with The Guardian checking on CNN, so media watchdogs have learned how Canada’s largest privately owned television conglomerate had imposed its own set of draconian rules on editors and reporters. Three hugely influential platforms were involved, the CTV network and its sister channels, CP24 and BNN Bloomberg. The Breach reported in late November 2023 that senior producers and editors across the different platforms “disparaged Palestinian guests, told employees that protests calling for a ceasefire should not be reported on, and blocked or delayed stories that included too much contextual information about Israel’s military occupation and regime of apartheid in Palestine.”

Reporters weren’t allowed to cover pro-Palestinian rallies or events unless they created a major inconvenience to the general public. One journalist told The Breach that Palestinian guests were expected not to offer political views or contextual background: “When it comes to Palestinian guests…they’re essentially brought on to cry. That’s all they’re good for.” Perhaps most troubling of all is that Palestinians who were “highly critical of Israel” would not be “invited back and clips of their interviews aren’t published on the network’s news websites…”

So, in effect, management was censoring public statements and erasing them from history.

The way that English media in the U.S., Canada, and Britain have covered the Gaza Crisis is an eye-opener in many ways. Keep in mind, as I wrote in a long piece months ago, American reporters’ bias against Palestine dates all the way back to the British Mandate. At the beginning of the Gaza Crisis, established operations like CNN and the New York Times seemed to treat the story with a business-as-usual approach, almost as if they forgot they weren’t in Martha Gellhorn’s era or in the 1970s but in a digital age where their behavior wouldn’t get the regular easy pass from the boys’ club. Why shouldn’t they cover the story the way they usually did?

Anyone who paid attention to how CNN covered Ethiopia’s war with the TPLF could identify the same shoddy practices and a clear, unapologetic imposition of bias. But most Americans weren’t emotionally or politically invested in Ethiopia, nor do they know much about the country, or care to learn. So, CNN collected an Emmy for its coverage packed with lies, took a victory lap, and waved its trophy in the air as its validation.

But for Palestine, there was and still is an emotional and political investment on the part of many ordinary Americans who are not of Middle East descent, even with widespread ignorance of the historical background. More importantly, activist movements for Palestine had evolved in sophistication since the 1970s, well enough to mobilize public indignation right at the perfect moment when watchdog websites could serve as a check on big media conduct.

Now consumers of English media, especially Americans, are waking up to realize their major TV networks and big brand newspapers cover protests at home over global affairs the same way they cover events overseas.

And the approach is a disconcerting one that invariably serves State Department interests. It is a colonial approach, only up until now, a smart, well-informed and left-leaning American might have thought of him- or herself as at worst, the passive accomplice to the nation’s corporate and military sins abroad, with the United States as the “colonizer.” Like the British facing the legacies of authoritarian policies at home on immigration and policing, it’s a hell of a wakeup call to realize you get the same media lies as the colonized — because you are the colonized, even at home.

It is no accident that night after night, day after day, these networks and papers do not bother to explore deeply or in any prolonged manner the opposition and protests to Netanyahu’s war in Israel or the criticisms made by high-profile politicians there. One only had to pull up the website for Haaretz and comb through the stories of just one news site to realize that Israeli opinion was not monolithic in its unity. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show noticed, and on Monday he skewered the argument that criticizing Israel automatically equated to antisemitism and aiding Hamas. After playing clips of heated criticism made by Israeli public figures, Stewart declared puckishly, “What antisemites the former prime minister of Israel and defense minister are!” While the shot was directed mainly at Fox News and Newsmax, it could have been applied to CNN as well.

The biased coverage has deeper implications, and Big Media’s arrogant lack of caring about its responsibilities is the cancer that’s killing journalism. The election that first put Donald Trump in the White House prompted news networks and papers to close ranks as he and his accomplices routinely attacked journalists, and the slogan, “journalism is not a crime,” was revived as reporters endured incarceration and harassment all over the globe.

But no one seems to be paying close attention to how Western media can be as much a threat to democratic values and freedom of speech as demagogues.

What else can be the cumulative effect when TV networks decide to suppress and censor the comments of Palestinian guests? When anchors slander elected politicians on air and a network colleague doubles down to repeat the libel? When news outlets misrepresent the facts of violent confrontations between peaceful protesters and hooligans, who are sometimes given free rein by police officers?

Big media, as I’ve written before, can dish it out but can’t take it. It doesn’t like being reviewed, let alone its bad habits exposed. Yet watchdog websites and more politically partisan sites have emerged as probably the best checks on Big Media’s power. Though they are often underfunded, they are diverse (for now) in their approaches and tone, which is in sharp contrast to the conglomerates that own multiple papers and TV stations in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia, often churning out the same message and recycling the same narrative, along with the same clips.

Big Media seldom has to pay any consequences for its transgressions. So far, Tapper hasn’t apologized to Tlaib for his smear, nor has Dana Bash, and Tapper tried to close the incident with his throwaway remark that he “misspoke.” But what is encouraging is that he felt obliged to admit he made an error. Shame doesn’t always work, but it perhaps remains the most powerful weapon we have for keeping reporters honest and sticking to the values they claim they espouse, that is if we know how to use it properly to reform journalistic institutions.

The dilemma is that by the time we notice the lie or the sloppy job, the damage is done. And operations like CNN, BBC, the New York Times, etc. — for all their periodic mea culpas that they failed “this time” — keep demonstrating that they’re not highly motivated to change.