Scott Pelley, the host of CBS’ “60 Minutes,” portrayed right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich as “fake news” in a tense interview in late March.
Less than two months later, journalists are beginning to admit that Pelley was wrong.
“Mike Cernovich continues to regularly scoop Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake, who appears to share at least one Trump administration source with the ‘Gorilla Mindset’ author,” wrote Will Sommer, an editor for The Hill, in his weekly newsletter on Monday. “Once again, Lake trailed in Cernovich’s wake this week with dueling stories about Trump’s discontent with national security adviser H.R. McMaster.”
On May 2, Cernovich reported that McMaster unilaterally hired Army Reserve Major General Ricky Waddell as his deputy “without obtaining authorization from President Donald Trump.” On May 8, Lake reported that chief of staff Reince Preibus was trying to block McMaster — who has become unpopular with Trump — from hiring Waddell. Two days, later, news broke that McMaster had successfully hired Waddel.
Cernovich, who has a history of promoting wild conspiracy theories — such as that Hillary Clinton suffers from Parkinson’s disease, previously scooped Lake to the news that former Obama adviser Susan Rice requested the unmasking of Trump associates in raw intelligence reports. (RELATED: Trump Supporter Labeled ‘Fake News’ By ’60 Minutes’ Beats Everyone To Susan Rice Scoop)
The scoop earned Cernovich a congratulatory tweet from Donald Trump Jr.
Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story. In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 4, 2017
Shortly after the Rice news broke, The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz admitted that “Cernovich now seems to have anonymous sources in the White House, or close to it” in a piece that was largely critical of Cernovich.
Even BuzzFeed News, which consistently has a liberal slant to its news coverage, conceded that Cernovich is getting some very real scoops.
“But the early months of the Trump administration have proven Pelley wrong,” BuzzFeed reporter Charlie Warzel wrote in a piece over the weekend titled, “What Happens When The Pro-Trump Media Get Actual Scoops?”
“Since April, Cernovich has broken a number of significant national security stories, many of which have been subsequently confirmed — at least in part — by mainstream outlets,” Warzel said, echoing a piece Cernovich published last week titled, “7 Stories Mike Cernovich Had Before the Mainstream Media— How can they call him ‘Fake News’?”
“The media needs to do some soul searching on itself and ask why they continue to spread provably false stories, and stop projecting their own dishonesty onto others,” Cernovich told The Daily Caller. “I knew my reporting would validated eventually. When you’re telling the truth and ahead of the mainstream media — like The Daily Caller, Breitbart, Cernovich and other truth-tellers — then they’re going to think you’re wrong, because they can’t see what you see.”