CNN Fails to Fact Check Nurse Who Trashed Her Own Patients: ‘They’re Filled With Anger and Hatred’
CNN is under fire for failing to verify claims by a nurse who trashed her own patients, claiming they were “filled with anger and hatred” over the coronavirus.
“They don’t want to believe that Covid is real,” South Dakota Nurse Jodi Doering said in a November 18 interview on the network. “It wasn’t one particular patient. It was just a culmination of so many people. and their last, dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’
She added, “When they should be spending time FaceTiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred.”
The network invited Doering for an interview after a post she wrote on the issue was widely shared on social media, but apparently failed to ask her colleagues whether they could vouch for Doering’s claims.
“No one else has gotten that statement back from a patient, specifically,” Kim Rieger, a spokeswoman for the Huron Regional Medical Center, one of the facilities where Doering works, said in a statement to The National Review. “Nor have they heard of that happening here,” said. “Not to call her a liar, because she provides care here as well as other hospitals, so it could have happened at another hospital.”
Nathan Johnson, a spokesman for the Avera Health System, which operates several hospitals in the region where Rieger works, echoed the sentiment. “Based on one informal conversation I had, a nurse leader said they had not heard anything like that taking place,” Johnson said. “But that is no comment on what Jodi claims she’s experienced, because we don’t have any insight into that.”
Wired’s David Zweig followed up with his own investigation — and found deaths linked to the coronavirus in Doering’s region had been limited. “Huron Regional Medical Center has seen a total of six Covid-19 deaths to date,” he noted. “Beadle County, where Huron is located, has registered a total of 22 such deaths. .. and in Sanborn County, where Doering lives, there’s been one Covid-19 death.”
Former CNN producer Steve Krakauer opined on the network’s failure to investigate, writing in his Sunday newsletter, “It’s a combination of two things that caused this journalistic malpractice — a reliance on Twitter, combined with a passive attack on Trump that ends up being too good to check by CNN and other outlets. Had they done any journalistic legwork, like Wired and National Review did, Doering would likely still be getting Twitter traction to tell what appears to be, at the least, a massive exaggeration… but not a national TV spotlight.”
CNN did not respond to Mediaite’s request for comment.
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