I just finished watching a story on CNN this morning about the flap over a Jerusalem newspaper publishing Barack Obama's private prayer that he offered at the Wailing Wall last week. The reporter on the scene in Jerusalem gave a very good report about what happened, and included comments from Rabbis explaining how this is incredible sacrilege. But at the end of her story, she stated that "CNN has decided not to publish the prayer".
Over the weekend, I had been reading the stories on CNN.com's "The Ticker" section. There is a story, Rabbi: Removal of Obama's purported prayer note 'sacrilegious' that is still up on that site. Over the weekend, the story included a photograph of the piece of paper that Obama wrote the prayer on, as well as a number of comments from readers taking CNN to task for tastelessly publishing the prayer.
So, I figured that perhaps the Jerusalem based reporter was just unaware of the website story. Bad fact checking from her editor, but maybe not an intentional lie. But then when the story was passed back to the anchor, Heidi Collins, she made a point of saying that the NY Post has decided to publish the prayer, but again, CNN has chosen not to. Another quick visit to "The Ticker" to see if the story was still there revealed that the photo of the prayer is mysteriously missing. But CNN was too stupid to destroy all of the evidence. Just when I was beginning to wonder if I only imagined the picture on CNN.com, and think that maybe I saw it on another site instead, I notice that the comments on the article criticizing CNN for printing the prayer are still intact.
So, CNN has lied twice about this and removed the evidence from their website. CNN was not the first to publish the prayer. I'm sure their first instinct was correct, but as other outlets began to print it they may have thought that because it was already out there, no harm would be done. Perhaps they felt that because there was a controversy about the publication, that the contents of the prayer had become newsworthy. But that's absurd. If Faux News tape recorded a Catholic confession and played the tape over the air, I couldn't imagine another news outlet thinking that it would be acceptable to play the tape as well. Obviously CNN has now thought the better of this because the note has been pulled. But lying about ever committing the sin is a serious breach of journalistic ethics. When you make a mistake, you're supposed to print a correction, not scrub your website of any evidence that a mistake was made at all.
I urge anyone reading this to let CNN know that we're on to them.