Old and busted, journalism edition: When your mother says she loves you, get a second source to confirm.
New Protection Racket Media hotness: When you see a narrative, seize it without bothering to check the facts.
A lot of people are jumping on the man in front of the camera in this faceplant, and justifiably so. However, as the record shows, this failure belongs to the entire CNN organization, which jumped to a conclusion early about the nature of a suspect in a terror attack … and not for the first time.
Let’s start with the viral clip first:
Jake Tapper identified the J6 pipe bomb suspect as a “30-Year-old white man.”
Idk about you but this guy does not look white to me. pic.twitter.com/Pcexq2OGlm
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 5, 2025
CNN anchor Jake Tapper was ripped by critics Thursday after he wrongly referred to accused DC pipe-bomber Brian Cole Jr. as “a white man.”
Tapper made the cringeworthy gaffe while discussing the arrest of Cole, who is black, during his opening segment on “The Lead.”
His “white man” comment came at 5:01 p.m., around the time CNN was the first outlet to publish a photo of Cole’s face that originated from the suspect’s mother’s Instagram account.
Cole’s father is also black and once enlisted the services of Ben Crump, an attorney best known for his racial discrimination cases.
Tapper may not have made this “cringeworthy gaffe,” or at least not alone. It’s difficult to believe that Tapper just came up with that claim in the moment or on his own. CNN has reporters who publish their own articles and feed that information for their news shows. News hosts front these segments, but even when the hour includes the host’s name, the reports offered are team efforts – and team failures.
Besides, as Mediaite’s Charlie Nash notes, it’s not the first time that CNN’s obsession with the “white man” left egg on the faces of their on-air talent. Five months ago, almost the same set of circumstances unfolded during another breaking news story involving a shooting suspect:
CNN anchor Erin Burnett flamed for saying NYC shooter Shane Tamura was ‘possibly white’ https://t.co/wrNW2crTC7 pic.twitter.com/wd465Vc1CL
— New York Post Metro (@nypmetro) July 29, 2025
CNN made a similar error regarding the race of a shooting suspect in July, with CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller reporting on-air that the suspect was “male, possibly white” – a claim repeated by CNN host Erin Burnett.
During CNN’s report, a surveillance image of the suspect was already circulating on social media, showing that he was clearly not white.
An hour later, the suspect was named as 27-year-old Shane Tamura.
Why would CNN keep making this same mistake? Why are they so invested in assuming that suspects are white before bothering to check? For the same reason that the American media rushed to report that the Israelis had “destroyed” the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza two years ago and killed 500 people, rather than wait for the sun to come up and realize the hospital was still standing and no one inside had been killed. The explosion was determined to be a dud missile launched by either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad that had dropped into the hospital parking lot and killed a handful of people.
But the truth doesn’t matter to the Protection Racket Media. Only the narrative matters. They already have a narrative in mind for crime, and they deploy it regardless of the facts, even when those facts emerge in real time as they are publishing the narrative. This is a patten, not a “gaffe,” driven by an organizational issue of corruption, not an individual issue.
At any rate, The Offspring are suddenly relevant again. This. Is. CNN. The world loves wannabes.
(Also: This is slightly NSFW.)
Editor’s note: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight.
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