Isaac Week 5 - Joe Rogan Blasts CNN for False Statements Creating More Distrust in the Media
Last week, Dr. Sanjay Gupta went on the Joe Rogan podcast. For those who don’t know, Dr. Sanjay Gupta is the chief medical correspondent for CNN. During the podcast, the two discussed the pandemic, vaccines and a variety of other topics. What went viral from the podcast was their discussion about how CNN treated Joe Rogan.
A little over a month ago, Joe Rogan contracted the Corona virus and was prescribed by his doctor to take Ivermectin, a drug used in the past by billions of people for other diseases that is not fully proven to help with someone who has the disease. Because Joe Rogan took this drug, he got a lot of flack from many left leaning news outlets. In particular, CNN has said multiple times in the past and continues to say that the drug that Joe Rogan took (Ivermectin) was horse dewormer. This was just a straight lie as Joe Rogan took the human form of the drug that was prescribed by his doctor. There are forms of the drug that can be used as horse dewormer, but what Rogan used was not that even though CNN labeled it as such.
So, when Dr. Sanjay Gupta went on the Joe Rogan podcast, Rogan pressed Dr. Gupta hard on this issue and Dr. Gupta even admitted that CNN was wrong to say that Rogan was taking horse dewormer. But the story didn’t end there.
One might think that maybe CNN made a mistake, so now that Dr. Gupta admitted to the mistake, the network will fix the issue and apologize, but that is not what happened. Later that week, Dr. Gupta went on Don Lemon’s show, a CNN host, and listened as Lemon doubled down on the lie and said again that Rogan took horse dewormer. So it became even more clear that this was a deliberate and targeted attack by the network on Joe Rogan. The funny part of the story is that Rogan has a much larger audience than CNN, so more people were able to see Rogan’s side of the story and didn’t just take what CNN said to be true.
The reason a story like this is important is because of the amount of trust that people have in the media. When the people see a large network like CNN deliberately lying about something as black and white as this, why should the people trust the network when it comes to political commentary and other more important newsworthy items. This is something that should be objective, and for the media to get it wrong just creates more distrust in the media. And this isn’t only CNN who does things like this, but this is just the most recent blatant example that trended.
It is because of this that people are turning to other sources for their news and opinion based shows like the Joe Rogan Podcast, which I highly recommend that people watch, and the Daily Wire to name a few alternative media sources. These sources of media are more popular than ever before and are generally beating cable news in audience numbers by a lot, showing how much distrust there is in the media today.
What do you think about how CNN treated Joe Rogan? Do you watch Joe Rogan, and if so, do you enjoy watching him? What do you think about the current state of the media in general? Do you recommend any other alternative media sites?
Hi Isaac! I haven't heard about this story, but the lesson you mentioned is super important. I also believe that the media can be a source of misinformation at times, so people must be careful and educate themselves before believing one side of a story. One must also be aware of the biases present in their news sources so that they can get a more holistic understanding of an issue instead of reading a one sided report. This lesson is extremely important for everyone to learn so that we can avoid misinformation and extremely biased news reports to the best of our ability. I often use the media bias fact checking website to identify news outlets' biases; Associated Press is "least biased," so I tend to read articles from them the most.
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