In a Monday interview on Fox & Friends, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested that the United States “profile” amid recent national security fears:
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in. They will check out.”
He later added when speaking to the network’s Bill O’Reilly:
“We have no choice. Israel does it, and Israel does it very successfully. It’s not that you want to do it…When they see somebody that they’d like to talk to, that they’d like to look at, that they’d maybe like to open up their satchel, and take a look [at] what’s inside, they do it. They don’t like to do it. I don’t like to do it.
…It works. If we see somebody that we think could be a problem at airports and other places you talk to them and you see what’s going on. We don’t do that. Not much.”
CNN took Trump’s comments and ran with them … and purposefully misquoted him, adding the word “racial” to his suggestions of profiling:
Multiple media outlets, including the Daily Wire, quickly called CNN out on their lies, but to no avail. CNN doubled down big time:
A piece by CNN’s Theodore Schleifer, titled “Donald Trump defends racial profiling in wake of bombings,” which was updated as recently as “8:59 PM ET, Tue September 20,” starts lying right out of the gate:
“Donald Trump on Monday reiterated his support for the controversial practice of racial profiling by police amid increasing threats to the homeland.”
The piece goes on to quote Trump directly; the direct quote never once uses the term “racial profiling.”
Schleifer notes that Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway even pushed back against that notion when speaking with CNN’s Erin Burnett Tuesday evening.
Yet the title and lede remain:
The only concession CNN seems to have given is during Tuesday evening’s Erin Burnett OutFront when Conway called out the network for its “racial profiling” chyron. Burnett said, “That was a lower third, as we call them, on our screen. I want to make it clear, the word ‘racial’ should not have been put in quotes.”
Well, that clarification certainly makes up for the hours and hours dedicated to making viewers and readers believe Donald Trump said he wanted to racially profile.