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Wrong race, wrong target, wrong story: CNN's mistakes all lean the same way

Brandon Tatum Shows Why Trump Calls CNN Fake News, One Correction at a Time

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanSeptember 19, 2026 · 5 min read
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As CNN fought the White House over its ban from the building, conservative commentator Brandon Tatum posted a short video on September 18, 2026, stitching together CNN’s own broadcasts to answer a simple question: why does the president keep calling the network fake news? “CNN is furious Trump calls them ‘fake news,’ yet somehow,” Tatum wrote, before listing the moments that, in his telling, explain it.

Most of the clips are not new. Two of them led to on-the-record CNN corrections within the past year. What makes the compilation land is not any single error but the direction they all point, and the timing: it arrived the same day the administration announced it was barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over what President Trump called their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS.”

The pipe bomb suspect

The first clip comes from December 2025, when the FBI arrested Brian Cole Jr. in the long-unsolved case of the pipe bombs left outside the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters on the eve of January 6, 2021. Anchoring CNN’s coverage, Jake Tapper described the suspect as “a 30-year-old white man from the D.C. suburbs.”

Minutes later, CNN aired the suspect’s photo. Cole is Black. Tapper corrected the record the next day: “Yesterday, minutes before we showed you the suspect’s photo, I should note that I mistakenly said that the suspect was White,” he told viewers, according to Fox News. “Obviously, as the photo revealed, he’s Black. Apologies for that mistake.”

Tapper apologized, and that deserves credit. But the original mistake was not a typo. It was an anchor filling in a detail no one had confirmed, and filling it in with the description that happened to fit the story much of the press had been telling about January 6 for years.

The Gracie Mansion attack

The second clip is from March 2026. On Saturday, March 7, two young men from suburban Pennsylvania, ages 18 and 19, allegedly threw improvised explosive devices at a “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” rally outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The case is being investigated as ISIS-inspired terrorism. New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the devices were real explosives capable of causing serious injury or death.

CNN’s first instinct was a social media post that read like the opening of a coming-of-age film. “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather,” it began, before noting that “their lives would drastically change” when they were arrested. After a wave of criticism, CNN deleted the post, saying it “failed to reflect the gravity of the incident, thereby breaching the editorial standards we require for all our reporting.”

Three days later, on Tuesday, March 10, Abby Phillip went to a commercial break on NewsNight with a tease that is the clip Tatum used: “Two Republicans say Muslims don’t belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, says nothing, really, to condemn those comments.”

That was false. The devices were thrown at the protesters, not at the mayor. The next day Phillip posted a correction on X: “I want to correct something I said last night. The bombs thrown in New York City over the weekend by ISIS-inspired attackers was thrown into a crowd of anti-Muslim protestors and not specifically targeted at Mayor Mamdani. That wording was inaccurate and I didn’t catch it ahead of time. I apologize for the error.”

So within four days, CNN turned accused ISIS-inspired bombers into teenagers having a bad day, and then told viewers the wrong target, recasting an attack on anti-Islam protesters as an attack on the city’s first Muslim mayor.

The athlete and the debate prep

Tatum’s other two clips go back further. One, which Tatum presents as CNN coverage, shows a speaker insisting of an athlete whose eligibility to compete in women’s sports had been challenged, “she is a woman.” The last is from June 2024, before President Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, when a CNN correspondent told viewers that “President Biden has spent days locked in intense preparation, surrounded by his closest advisors at Camp David,” with “full mock debates” underway “under the lights.”

The country saw how that preparation turned out on June 27, 2024. Days later, according to a New York Times report summarized by Breitbart, a person familiar with the process said Biden’s Camp David sessions never began before 11 a.m. and that he took naps on each of the six days. White House spokesman Andrew Bates denied the account at the time.

Why the pattern matters now

Any newsroom gets things wrong under deadline pressure. The fair test is not whether a network makes mistakes, but whether its mistakes are random. A random error is as likely to cut one way as the other. Tatum’s point is that CNN’s don’t. The suspect is assumed to be white. The jihadist bombers are softened. The target becomes the Muslim mayor rather than the protesters. The aging president is in intense preparation rather than struggling.

That is the context for the fight now underway over CNN’s access to the White House. Reasonable people can debate whether banning a news outlet from the White House is the right response. But a network that wants the public to see it as a neutral referee has to explain why its errors so reliably point in one direction, and the corrections, however sincere, only prove that its own people know they got it wrong.

One mistake is an accident, but when every mistake leans the same way, it is not a mistake anymore; it is a worldview.

Editor’s note: This article covers CNN on-air and online errors from June 2024, December 2025 and March 2026 that drew renewed attention in September 2026 after Brandon Tatum’s video.

Sources

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