Major Media Outlet Reports Parody Post As News
CNN issued an on-air correction Thursday morning after the network mistakenly featured a satirical quote from a parody social media account during a segment the previous day. Audie Cornish, host of “CNN This Morning,” acknowledged the error roughly 24 hours after Wednesday’s broadcast. During that earlier episode, the program displayed a post from an X […]
CNN issued an on-air correction Thursday morning after the network mistakenly featured a satirical quote from a parody social media account during a segment the previous day.
Audie Cornish, host of “CNN This Morning,” acknowledged the error roughly 24 hours after Wednesday’s broadcast. During that earlier episode, the program displayed a post from an X account named Jack Kimble, which presents itself as belonging to a Republican member of Congress but is actually a parody account.
The post appeared alongside legitimate comments from representatives of senior Senate Republicans and conservative political commentator Scott Jennings. Because it was presented in the same context as those real statements, viewers were given no immediate indication that the quote was intended as satire.
“Yesterday on the show, we displayed quotes from some Republicans about Senator Mitch McConnell’s stay in the hospital,” Cornish said during Thursday’s correction. “One of them was mistakenly taken from a parody account on Twitter.”
Cornish then directly addressed the network’s mistake.
“Obviously, we should not have done that, and we regret the error,” she said.
The parody post had been included in a Wednesday morning segment focused on the health of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who is 84 years old and was reportedly recovering in the hospital.
“I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior Senator from Kentucky. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 45 minutes,” the Jack Kimble account wrote in the post shown by CNN.
The account’s profile makes several claims that signal it is not authentic. Its biography says Kimble is a Republican representing California’s 54th Congressional District. No such congressional district currently exists. The fictional identity and exaggerated political commentary are part of the account’s satirical presentation.
After CNN aired the post, the person behind the account responded publicly on X and mocked the network for failing to recognize the parody.
“CNN’s Extreme leftwing bias exposed,” Kimble wrote later Wednesday morning.