CNN Wins the "They All Look Alike" Award

From the nation’s most trusted source in news.

Yesterday, Anderson Cooper was anchoring CNN’s coverage of Trump’s rally in Florida. As part of it, a White House official, Raj Shah, is quoted

Then this happened:

.@CNN this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews pic.twitter.com/tS9QBndBw0

— Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) December 9, 2017

Followed by this

I know Raj Shah.
I've worked with Raj Shah.
This is not @RajShah45.
…. @CNN you're losing more credibility by the hour. Time to reboot. https://t.co/2hZ3UqGacS

— Emily Miller (@emilymiller) December 9, 2017

https://twitter.com/PfeifferDC/status/939300600948420608

This is the first time I've ever said this, but: #SarahHuckabeeSanders is right. …@CNN, you've confused the very distinguished Dr #RajShah (President of Rockefeller Foundation, fmr head of @USAID— shown in photo) with a White House flack who happens to have the same name. https://t.co/ZUBFMsWv0M

— Jonah Blank (@JonahBlank) December 9, 2017

Indeed, apparently whoever was in charge of the segment–or one of their flunkies–did a quick Google search.

They snagged a random image among the multitude of guys named Raj Shah (I’m no expert, but there are at least two of them on my office email directory, so I think the name is not extremely rare) and ran with it. The underlying assumption in this is that if you seen one Raj Shah, you’ve seen all Raj Shahs. In fact, CNN showed the same level of fact checking here as they do on their news programming. All it takes is a mouse-click or touch of a fingertip to identify who the image belongs to in much more detail than just their name. But that was too onerous for CNN’s crack team.

Imagine, just for a moment if Fox News had been covering an event, quoted someone named Juan Valdez, and came up with this image

The one good thing about any of this is that CNN, in particular, is being revealed as a hyper-partisan and very sloppy news organization. It is sort of like MSNBC but with less talented people. If they can’t get stuff like this right, how can we trust them to tell an apple from a banana because they are both fruits.