This CNN reporter just tried to trick me into participating in an attack piece on Palmer Report

This afternoon I received an email from CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, asking me to grant him an interview for an article he’s working on about Palmer Report. He was friendly enough about it that he even signed it “Warmly, Oliver.” But I learned awhile ago not to trust the intentions of my fellow political journalists. So I checked his Twitter page, and sure enough, just yesterday he was whining about how “sad” it makes him that respected political pundits have been sharing Palmer Report articles Oops.

Based on his tweet, Darcy is rather obviously writing an article for CNN.com that’s critical of Palmer Report, and critical of the public figures who seem to like Palmer Report. And that’s his prerogative; I’ve certainly been critical of CNN’s consistently inept and often fictional coverage of the 2016 election. But reaching out to me under friendly terms to try to get me provide comments for an attack piece that he’s hoping I won’t figure out is an attack piece? That’s a breach of ethics. Unfortunately, this is an old trick among unscrupulous journalists. They think that if they can trick their target into participating in the attack piece, those reading the article will view the attack as being more legitimate.

So I called out Mr. Darcy on Twitter this afternoon for his hijinks, because the public deserves to know when major news outlets like CNN are engaged in this kind of nonsense instead of doing their jobs. This prompted another CNN reporter, Andrew Kaczynski, to chime in. His logic: Darcy can’t have been trying to trick me, because I was aware of his tweet. Huh? Nevermind that Darcy had no way of knowing I was aware of his tweet. In any case Kaczynski seems to be so negatively obsessed with Palmer Report that he takes a screen capture whenever a respected public figure shares a Palmer Report article, some of them going back months, and then he tweets those screen captures in the hope of shaming those public figures. That’s not just creepy; it’s borderline stalker-ish.

Here’s what I don’t get: these two guys are reporters for CNN. They have the kind of corporate journalistic clout and investigative resources that a nobody like me could only dream of having access to. If I had CNN’s resources, scandals like Trump-Russia would be solved by now. And yet even as I’m doing my best to report on some of the biggest political scandals in our nation’s history, these two CNN reporters are instead focusing their editorial resources on whining about me.

So you’ll probably see an attack piece about Palmer Report on the CNN website soon. Now that I’ve called out their antics, perhaps they’ll have a different CNN reporter write it, or perhaps they’ll have the sense to scrap the stunt entirely. But when someone as big as CNN resorts to these kinds of dishonest hijinks to cover for their own unwillingness to report on the nation’s biggest scandals in a responsible manner, the public deserves to know.

The irony is that if major news outlets like CNN were willing to do their jobs well, independent sites like Palmer Report wouldn’t need to exist. But as it stands, I’ve got to get back to doing these two CNN reporters’ jobs for them. So I’ll just refer you to this list of instances where Palmer Report was early to a story and was attacked for it, only to be subsequently vindicated (link).