CNN anchor Jake Tapper spreads anti-Palestinian propaganda

Michael F. Brown Media Watch 24 September 2024

Head and shoulders photo of Jake Tapper

CNN anchor Jake Tapper lies with seemingly no consequences forthcoming from his news network.

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Jake Tapper, an anchor with CNN, asserted on Thursday that Hamas “murdered thousands of civilians” on 7 October.

This is a lie.

In fact, contradicting Tapper’s propaganda, approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed that day, over 300 of them soldiers and police officers, as The New York Times noted in a correction I suggested to the newspaper of record last year.

Some Israelis were even killed by the Israeli military that day, though CNN anchor Erin Burnett shockingly failed to ask eyewitness Yasmin Porat about this reality or, if she did, failed to include that segment in her report.

CNN, in contrast to The New York Times, never corrected any of the lies about casualties from anchor Dana Bash I pointed out to them.

Abby Phillip interviewed an Israeli settler from the West Bank whose mother was killed on 7 October. That settler, Betzalel Taljah, declared war on Palestinian civilians during his interview with Phillip.

Neither Phillip nor Wolf Blitzer, who interviewed Taljah two days later, followed up with a question about the ethics and legality of a war on civilians. Taljah later expressed genocidal views regarding Gaza on Facebook.

The lie from Tapper about the number of Israeli civilians killed on 7 October comes in the context of nearly a year of CNN misrepresenting facts, freezing out Palestinian guests and downplaying the horror of what is happening in Gaza. Perhaps most importantly, history for Tapper seemingly begins on 7 October.

He avoids discussion of Israel’s dispossession of some 800,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba as well as reference to Israeli apartheid. He prefers to convey the impression that Palestinian anger emerges from a vacuum.

Tapper, whose anti-Palestinian views I have examined previously, is helping create the genocidal environment faced by Palestinians with this sort of uncorrected prevarication.

CNN, including journalists from News Standards & Practices, did not respond to my inquiry as to whether a correction would be issued. The news organization as a whole is complicit in Tapper’s false reporting.

The journalism practiced by Tapper is irresponsible and there appear to be no consequences for his getting this fundamental fact wrong. He has recently blocked correspondence from me from three email addresses and in late 2016 indicated to me that he was freezing out a prominent East Coast Palestinian commentator.

That individual, Yousef Munayyer, on Friday gave me permission to disclose his name. A decision by Tapper to freeze out Munayyer as “a troll and a liar” – as he told me in an email – calls into question CNN’s willingness to speak to Palestinians and Palestinian Americans about the realities they face.

Top CNN executives should reckon with the anti-Palestinian bias of Tapper – and other anchors’ overall exclusion of Palestinians – not that this reality isn’t patently obvious and presumably agreeable to the news network.

Repeated attacks on Rashida Tlaib

Tapper’s anti-Palestinian stance is particularly obvious with his repeated attacks on Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

The latest occurred Sunday when he falsely claimed in an interview with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer that Tlaib said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is only prosecuting University of Michigan students “because she’s Jewish.”

But despite widespread efforts to paint Tlaib as an anti-Semite, she never said what Tapper asserted. Nessel, too, misrepresented the situation when she tweeted that Tlaib “should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as attorney general. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.”

In fact, Tlaib said: “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. 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.”

There is no reference to Nessel’s religion.

The Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Jewish Insider Editor-in-Chief Josh Kraushaar also made the false attribution to Tlaib.

Kraushaar wrote that “Tlaib has also claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.” But the article he links to says no such thing.

Tapper’s misleading words serve as just one more example of his anti-Palestinian bias.

But that’s only for those who dig deeper. Many viewers will simply accept Tapper’s misrepresentation.

Whitmer caved to Tapper’s false charges on Monday.
In the Sunday segment, Tapper also ignored the racist cartoon still being touted by a Detroit News journalist against Tlaib that ran in the infamously segregationist National Review.

It was this cartoon that elicited the beginning of Nessel’s tweet: “Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong.”

Tapper could have sought out Jewish members of Congress who just hours later called the cartoon “appalling and hateful,” but he chose instead to misrepresent Tlaib’s words and highlight Nessel’s charged accusation that the congresswoman’s position is anti-Semitic. His approach needlessly risks generating tension between Jewish and Palestinian communities in the US.

It’s shameless and reckless, but fits a pattern of animosity toward Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman in the US Congress and an advocate of equal rights for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Tapper did not respond to questions from The Electronic Intifada as he has blocked my work email account and put himself beyond the reach of my questions by doing so. He did admit on Monday afternoon on air that he “misspoke” the previous day, noting in a question to Nessel that “Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion.”

His comment was entirely insufficient, lacked an apology, and simply led to a further attack by Nessel on Tlaib, thereby generating even more rage and hate against the congresswoman than kicked up the previous day – all on the basis of a false charge.

Children in Lebanon

One of the most disturbing aspects of CNN this past week is the frequency with which anchors simply ignored that Lebanese children were killed in what explosives expert Sean Moorhouse termed “audacious” and “impressive” pager and walkie talkie attacks. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer failed to raise with the former British Army officer the deaths of four children in the two attacks.

CNN anchor Laura Coates did much the same on Tuesday night last week in her breathless propaganda on the pager attack, saying the “jaw-dropping” strike surpassed James Bond.

“Look, it might be one of the most extraordinary espionage operations in recent history,” said Coates. “Not even James Bond could have pulled this off.”

No, it takes a state and leaders optimistic that they are beyond the reach of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Impunity has fostered contempt among Israeli leaders for international humanitarian law and the belief that terror when inflicted by Israel will be played up by media in the US as astounding rather than emblematic of a chilling new world.

US State Department special envoy on anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt is similarly enamored and felt at liberty to joke about the unprecedented beeper attack despite the fact it killed Lebanese children and killed and maimed other bystanders. Arab life has little meaning for such officials and there will almost certainly be no consequences for her hateful attempt at humor.

Lebanese children and other civilians were caught in the midst of the Israeli pager war crime and violation of international humanitarian law. Yet there was nothing from Coates on Tuesday night about civilian casualties.

That’s a worrisome abandonment of journalistic responsibility. Instead, she chose to hype the Israeli attack, even as it spread fear and terror across Lebanon.

On Monday morning, Mark Hertling, a retired US lieutenant-general and CNN military analyst, told the CNN audience that “150 jets in areas of the Gaza, Lebanon and also operated in Judea and Samaria” are striking “those targets where Hizballah terrorists and others are communicating.”
Hertling embraces here the language of Israeli expansionists – and Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, West Bank colonizer-in-chief in the US House of Representatives – who refer to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” and seek to make it Israeli sovereign territory.

CNN did not respond to my email on Hertling’s comment. This is, however, a new low in CNN accepting Israeli territorial claims and another clear example of putting forward propaganda rather than news.

In a 1988 monograph about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hertling wrote of Israeli leaders and their plans: “If the attack went well the army might drive the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] out of Lebanon entirely, establishing a ‘new order’ in Lebanon and encouraging Palestinians to return to the East Bank.”

But “return” from Lebanon to the East Bank – that is to Jordan – is not return to 1948 homes and lands but further entrenching ethnic cleansing, only now in Jordan rather than in Lebanon. Hertling ignored or simply failed to worry over exchanging one ethnic cleansing for another. This is a dangerous framework for a CNN military analyst to be operating from in conveying information to viewers.

CNN ignores anti-Arab racism in US Senate

It’s not just anti-Palestinian racism running amuck in US mainstream news media, but a broader anti-Arab racism as seen in Washington politics this past week.

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, ironically during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes in the US, inveighed against Arab American Institute executive director Maya Berry, at one point telling her to gasps from onlookers, “You should hide your head in a bag.” This after repeatedly interrupting her and putting words in her mouth.

At one point, Kennedy absurdly asked if she backed Iran and “their hatred of Jews.” Berry said no.

But the insinuation is grotesque that an Arab American witness who supports Palestinian rights must hate Jews.

CNN failed to cover Kennedy’s outburst. I could find no transcript evidence or evidence of an article at CNN.com about the bigoted temper tantrum in response to being confronted by an Arab American witness far brighter than the Louisiana zealot.

There appear to be no consequences, no censure, as a result of the meltdown. There’s one set of rules for Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and her calls for equal rights – who was censured by her colleagues – and another for an older white man in the US Senate who detests Arabs and any notion of rights for Palestinians.

As Zeeshan Aleem wrote for MSNBC: “Kennedy’s rhetoric was a reminder of how many supporters of Israel in Washington will conflate any kind of support for Palestinians’ dignity – in this case, funding for UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestine refugees] – with anti-Semitism. These smear campaigns are intended to discourage criticism of Israel through ad hominem attacks.”

None of this from Kennedy should come as any surprise. Back in May, he claimed: “There’s a substantial Hamas wing of the Democratic Party. They believe in diversity, equity, inclusion and the right to kill Jews.”

Claims that Democrats support a “right to kill Jews” are, of course, sickening nonsense. But a substantial part of the Democratic leadership believes in heavily arming Israel, enabling it to continue carrying out war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

In large part, Israel is where the two parties most agree. The consequences for Palestinians are grim as grassroots Democrats have largely had their concerns about Gaza ignored and yet now many are prepared to vote for presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the November election despite the fact she has made crystal clear her determination to arm apartheid Israel.

Those consequences, often deadly for Palestinian children in Gaza, were ignored Saturday by CNN – other than briefly and very early in the morning – but can be seen here. Viewer beware. It’s horrifying as is much of the news from Gaza that CNN chooses not to share with viewers.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.