It’s alarming news this week that CNN will host the first general presidential debate next month with Jake Tapper as one of the moderators. His credibility as a fact-checker is questionable given his past, especially when it comes to trusting questionable sources, even as blatant as Hamas propaganda.
We need to rewind to last year, only ten days after Hamas’ terrorist attack on innocent Israelis. Tapper gave the benefit of doubt to Hamas’ inflated death toll in Gaza without any concrete proof. This was his remark on October 17th, basing his claims on the reported attack on a hospital in the centre of Gaza City. Despite the news of the attack being minutes old, Tapper had no problem regurgitating the exaggerated numbers of casualties.
Later, it was revealed that it wasn’t an Israeli rocket that caused the damage; it was a Hamas rocket fired from Gaza, causing far fewer casualties than originally reported by Tapper. And although he seemed to avoid responsibility for spreading Hamas’ misinformation, he later reported how the United Nations downwardly revised their figures on Palestinian fatalities.
However, he conveniently skipped crucial information such as the number being lowered by a whopping 50%. Instead, Tapper turned to Jeremy Diamond who presented the revised figures as minor, necessary tweaks. Diamond even went on to defend the notoriously unreliable Gaza Ministry of Health’s exaggerated figures, arguing that the U.S., United Nations, and other aid agencies confirmed their numbers in previous conflicts.
The following day, the tone of Tapper’s reporting changed drastically. All of a sudden, his trust in figures took a nosedive when it came to the Israeli Defense Forces reporting a successful strike against a Hamas “war room” in a U.N. school. Unable to independently confirm Israel’s claim, Tapper’s sudden skepticism was conspicuous considering his prior acceptance of unsubstantiated figures from a party notorious for distorting facts to further their agenda.
Bearing this in mind, can we trust Tapper to accurately present facts in a presidential debate? Given his doubtful objectivity in the past, moderating a debate might cause him to equate facts with fiction.
As proved by past incidents, Tapper can be quick to accept exaggerated numbers fed by biased parties while suddenly developing skepticism towards others. Such inconsistency threatens to disrupt the forthcoming presidential debate discourse, injecting unwarranted bias in a setting that demands utmost objectivity. So, it’s high time we question such moderator choices and prioritize unbiased facts over narrative-driven reporting.
