Pushing the public's panic buttons: CBS caught in the act

FPI / May 8, 2020

From CBS being caught arranging a fake scene at a COVID-19 testing site in Michigan, to a reporter in Florida who seemed to believe people catch the virus one day and die the next, more and more phony media reports amid the pandemic are being exposed.

Project Veritas released a video recorded at a drive-up coronavirus testing site at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A Project Veritas insider said a "CBS Good Morning" crew, seeing only one or two cars in line at the site, proceeded to pull medical professionals from the center and asked them to get into their cars and pretend to be patients waiting to get tested. CBS wanted to make sure to show a long line of cars in its report.

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said: “Our insider told us that medical personnel were taken away from treating patients and made the line longer for actual patients waiting for the COVID-19 test.”

O’Keefe asked the insider: “You’re telling me you’re a hundred percent certain that CBS News, CBS News Corporation–national, staged a fake event. They faked the news. They faked the reality and broadcasted that to all of their audience last Friday on 'CBS This Morning?' ”

The insider replied, “A hundred percent. Absolutely.”

Several employees, spoke with the insider who was equipped with a hidden camera.

Nick Ross, a corporate cleaning site supervisor at the Cherry Health facility, told the insider he had been there “when the CBS News crew arrived and set up the video shoot” at the testing site in the parking lot. He said, “Apparently the news crew wanted more people in the line because they knew it was scheduled.”

Maria Hernandez-Vaquez, a professional registration specialist, told the insider that Cherry Health Director of Quality and Informatics “Glenda Walker helped to organize the facility’s workers into the COVID-19 testing line.”

An RN told him, “It’s just annoying because we could have done other stuff.” She said they had been notified that the CBS News crew was coming. “We knew they were coming. We had no clue that we’re going to have to, like, do fake patients.”

A second RN, Alison Mauro, explained to the insider that they were not performing the actual squab test on the non-patients as CBS News was filming. She did say that the very few actual patients were forced to wait longer because of the “manufactured line.” She said, “We pretended. There were a couple of real patients, which made it worse.”

RedState's Elizabeth Vaughn noted: "CBS is trying to make the pandemic appear worse than it is. Look at the long line of people sitting in their cars waiting to be tested at a time when the curve has supposedly flattened and most Americans are anxious to return to work. A long line of cars tells a different story than one or two cars would tell."

Last month, “CBS This Morning” used a video recorded at a crowded Italian hospital on a story about New York's alleged "dire" need for ventilators.

In another case of media deception, Tampa Bay.com reporter Chris Tesch tweeted on May 5: "BREAKING: One day after reopening, Florida recorded a record number of new deaths Tuesday from the novel coronavirus, with 113 fatalities reported, including 11 in the Tampa Bay region."

Several Twitter users pointed out to Tesch that his take on the number of reported deaths is "not how it works."

Many pointed out the logical gap in the tweet which implied the relationship of one event to the other when it simply isn’t possible. "You don’t catch it and then die the next day. Unless they’ve discovered a magical new strain," RedState's Nick Arama noted.

"Additionally, the number itself is deceptive. If you read the article, the number doesn’t indicate the number of people who died in the past day but is ‘spiking’ because it’s adding in deaths of non-Florida residents who hadn’t been previously counted and may have died weeks ago," Arama noted.

For coronavirus, "there’s an incubation period before it becomes apparent that averages 5 days," Arama noted. "Not to mention there’s a lag time for deaths from when it becomes symptomatic to when someone might die, maybe ten days to two weeks. Add to that a lag in reporting from when someone dies to when they make the list, it’s not immediate. All told, it could be weeks from contracting the virus to dying.

"But hey, media being media. What would they be if they weren’t trying to sell a narrative?"

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany slammed several media outlets during Wednesday’s press briefing.

McEnany was responding to a question from Reuters reporter Jeff Mason, who asked whether she would like to take back a comment about President Donald Trump’s initial ban on travel from China.

“In a previous life, before you were press secretary, you worked for the campaign,” Mason said, noting that McEnany had once declared that Trump would not allow coronavirus to spread to the United States. “Given what has happened since then, obviously, would you like to take that back?”

McEnany began by adding context to her initial comment, saying that preventing the spread of coronavirus to the United States had been the intent of Trump’s move to ban travel from China.

But then McEnany turned the question back on Mason, saying, “I guess I would turn the question back on the media and ask similar questions. Does Vox want to take back that they proclaimed that ‘the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic’? Does the Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to ‘get a grip, the flu is bigger than the coronavirus’? Does the Washington Post likewise want to take back that ‘our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus’? Does the New York Times want to take back that the ‘fear of the virus may be spreading faster than the virus itself’? Does NPR want to take back that ‘the flu is a much bigger threat than the coronavirus’? And finally, once again the Washington Post, would they like to take back that ’the government should not respond aggressively to the coronavirus’?”

Also at the White House on Wednesday, a nurse pushed back when a reporter asked Trump why the nurse and several other nurses gathered in the Oval Office during a press conference were not wearing masks or social distancing.

“We’re all COVID-19 free. We were all tested,” said the nurse, identified by ABC News as American Association of Nurse Practitioners President Sophia Turner.

The reporter had asked the president why the nurses who flanked him during the meeting were not keeping their distance.

“We are not socially distancing because we are all negative … and we wouldn’t do anything to harm our president, obviously,” the nurse said before adding that she works at a center in Louisiana and frequently gets tested.

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