On his program Wednesday night, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper addressed a discrepancy in his coverage of the so-called “no-go zones” that in recent weeks have embarrassed rival cable-news network Fox News. His tightly worded statement read like this:
On Monday night on this program we aired a report critical of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Fox News for continually saying there were no go zones in England and elsewhere. I think if you are going to point fingers at other people’s mistakes, you should also acknowledge your own mistakes and we didn’t do that on the program. In the wake of the Paris attacks several guests on this program mentioned no go zones in France. I didn’t challenge them and twice referred to them as well. I should have been more skeptical. Won’t make the same mistake again.
Well said.
As noted previously on this blog, Cooper on Jan. 9 chatted with former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, who said, “the Europeans and the French in particular have problems that are the result of also 751 ‘no-go zones’ in France where you have Islamic communities that have formed councils that are managing these areas. And the police don’t go in. If you look at Sweden there are 55 ‘no-go zones’ there. You know, firefighters or ambulance drivers go in there and they’re attacked. Their vehicles are lit on fire, their tires are slashed, and the Europeans have not pushed back against this. They can’t surveil people inside the ‘no-go zones’ if they get and go in there.” Cooper later professed the existence of no-go zones as an established fact.
As Cooper himself pointed out, his program and CNN more broadly gave Jindal one heck of a shellacking over the governor’s insistence that British neighborhoods are plagued by “no-go zones.” Not to mention Fox News: Segment after segment on CNN has covered Fox News’s promotion of the concept as well as the threat by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to sue the leading U.S. cable news network over its coverage.
Like a professional, Cooper criticizes his own failure to “challenge” his guests on the “no-go zone” claims. “Won’t make the same mistake again,” he promises. That’s the right pledge, but a towering one just the same. As opposed to, say, a media blogger who gets to pause and think about stuff before writing, Cooper in the days following the Charlie Hebdo attacks was performing on-the-fly live coverage in a foreign country while news was happening all around him. That he whiffed at the job of spot-checking some extravagant claims about the breakdown of civil order in Europe is a failure for sure, but an understandable failure.
Breaking cable-news coverage of big events commonly produces errors large and small. Maybe Cooper’s pitch-perfect self-check — as well as Fox News’s apologies and corrections last weekend — can kick off a trend in which networks look back at the mistakes and set the record straight. There’s no shame in doing so.
