Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
In the last three days, CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have performed a masterclass in journalistic malpractice — better described in this case as “lying.”
Both anchors devoted concerted airtime to accusing Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., of antisemitism based on a comment they attributed to the Palestinian American member of Congress — a comment she never came close to making.
Anyone watching CNN’s “State of the Union” with Tapper on Sunday, or “Inside Politics” with Dana Bash on Monday, would have heard that Tlaib questioned Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s ability to fairly do her job because Nessel is Jewish. Little matter to the primetime journalists that Tlaib’s recent criticism of Nessel did not in any way mention or refer to the attorney general’s Jewish faith or identity.
The lie stems from Tlaib’s comments on Nessel’s decision to prosecute 11 Gaza solidarity protesters from the University of Michigan. The student demonstrators are facing overreaching criminal charges for camping out on their own college campus to protest the funding of Israel’s genocidal war.
“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib told the Detroit Metro Times. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
Tlaib’s accusation of anti-Palestinian bias, which is institutionally rampant nationwide, was immediately twisted by Nessel into an alleged antisemitic attack. “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong,” wrote Nessel on X. Again, Nessel’s religion was not mentioned.
Thus started the smear campaign.
CNN’s Tapper, unburdened by basic journalistic standards like checking quotes, took it as given that Tlaib had accused Nessel of bias as a Jewish prosecutor. On Sunday, he interviewed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and asked her if she believed Tlaib’s comments on Nessel were antisemitic.
“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,” said Tapper.
Whitmer demurred, choosing to stay out of the fray.
On Monday, CNN’s Bash doubled down on her show, playing a clip from Tapper’s segment. Bash said without equivocation that Tlaib accused “the state’s Jewish attorney general” of “letting her religion influence her job.” Bash called it a “sad reality” that the Michigan governor failed to condemn an incident of antisemitism that never occurred.
The remarks about Whitmer were part of a nonstop barrage based on Tapper’s misleading question. Eventually, Whitmer relented and released a statement to Tapper condemning Tlaib for comments which, again, Tlaib did not make.
Incredibly, Tapper and Bash kept going even as the journalist whose interview set off the fracas repeatedly admonished them that Tlaib had said no such thing.
On Tuesday, even though it had been clearly established that Tlaib made no such claim about Nessel, a group of 21 House Democrats released a statement. They wrote that “implying these cases are being handled unfairly due to her religious background is antisemitic, deeply disturbing, and unacceptable.” The statement did not explicitly name Tlaib but repeated the exact smear she is facing, tacitly tacitly giving credence to the false antisemitism accusations.
Photo: Mandel Ngan//AFP via Getty Images
“This Is a Lie”
Tlaib is no stranger to slurs and slander.
Republicans often call her a “terrorist” without compunction; just last week the National Review published a cartoon depicting Tlaib with an exploding pager to suggest she is a Hezbollah operative. Her Democratic colleagues hardly treat her any better: When the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib for speaking out against Israel’s genocidal war and defending Palestinian resistance, 22 members of her own party supported the discriminatory resolution.
Nor should we be surprised to see yet another example of Palestinian solidarity silenced through the groundless weaponization of antisemitism. CNN’s own staff has railed against the network’s consistent pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias. There was something particularly surreal, however, observing the lie about Tlaib crystallize into accepted fact and then presumed premise in the span of 48 hours, all while the Congress member’s actual words were readily available — and widely circulating.
Steve Neavling, the Metro Times reporter who interviewed Tlaib, on whose story the antisemitism claims are based, spent the last two days attempting to counteract the lies, tweeting at Tapper and Bash, and publishing an explicit fact-check report in the Metro Times.
“This is a lie,” Neavling wrote on X in response to Tapper. “You’re referring to a story I wrote for @metrotimes, and U.S. Rep. Tlaib never said what you’re saying she said.” In a follow-up tweet responding to Bash’s segment, Neavling wrote, “Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened. U.S. Rep. @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she’s Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people.”
Neavling’s initial introduction to the quote — “Tlaib also criticized Nessel, who is the first Jewish person elected Attorney General of Michigan, for what she believes is a biased approach to the protest” — may have led to confusion that set off the smear campaign, but Tapper and Bash have no excuse to perpetuate it once the record had been set straight.
Correcting a widely spread lie is like putting toothpaste back in the tube.
Correcting a widely spread lie is like putting toothpaste back in the tube. Despite Neavling’s attempted corrections, boosted and shared tens of thousands of times on social media, by Monday, the story had expanded to focus on Whitmer and her refusal to condemn Tlaib. That Tlaib had made antisemitic comments — that it is antisemitic to highlight the persecution of Palestinians and their supporters — were established as background assumptions to the story.
The governor faced further backlash from predictable corners. The Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted at directly at Whitmer, noting “When a congresswoman accuses the attorney general of prosecuting protestors simply because she’s Jewish, it’s bias,” he wrote.
Whitmer then put out her statement, shared by Tapper on X. Instead of rightfully correcting the record and attempting to exonerate her defamed Democratic colleague, Whitmer said, “The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic.”
And, indeed, such a suggestion would be antisemitic, had anyone made it; no one did.
At the time of writing, no public apologies have been offered to Tlaib. On Monday night, in an interview with Nessel, Tapper said on air that he “misspoke” on Sunday and that he was “trying to characterize” Nessel’s views on Tlaib’s comments. He asked the prosecutor whether she stood by her antisemitism accusation.
“Rashida Tlaib is an individual who is well known for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are antisemitic in nature,” said Nessel, once again citing no evidence.
