Deidra Bosa of CNBC apologized on air Monday night for falling for pranksters who pretended to be Twitter engineers who were fired by Elon Musk after he took over the company.
About Friday at Twitter HQ – I didn’t do enough to confirm and I regret the mistake pic.twitter.com/BGKEr8Osto
— Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) October 31, 2022
“I’d like to address something that CNBC reported Friday. I tweeted that a team of data engineers were laid off at Twitter after speaking to two people outside of headquarters who claimed that they were,” Bosa said on air. “They were not real employees and I didn’t do enough to confirm that they were. They got me, and that is on me. We, I regret the mistake.”
Both CNBC and Bloomberg reported the story on Friday, seemingly competing with each other to report the fake news first. Bloomberg reporters Ed Ludlow and Maxwell Adler wrote a story with the headline, “Elon Musk Starts Cutting Jobs At Twitter.”
As journalists, Bosa, Ludlow, and Adler have a responsibility to verify facts and they should have at least contact Twitter to corroborate the “employees’” stories. Instead, they saw what they wanted to see to write a narrative about Elon Musk and his purchase of Twitter.
Even Elon Musk himself caught wind of what was happening outside of his headquarters and tweeted, “Best troll ever.”
One of the best trolls ever 🤣🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022
To show the sloppiness of the journalism that took place, the two men outside of Twitter made up fake backstories and fake names as well. At one point, the man who called himself Rahul Ligma produced a copy of Michele Obama’s biography in the middle of the interview. The man held up the book and said, “Michelle Obama wouldn’t have happened if Elon Musk owned Twitter. Obama in 2008 wouldn’t have happened without Elon Musk owning Twitter.”
Throughout the interview it was clear that the two men fooled Bosa completely as she at one point said, “They are visibly shaken. Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn’t know how he’s going to make payments.”
The story and subsequent apology has been all over Twitter with thousands of people dressing up and being interviewed as fake Twitter employees to make fun of the incident.
At the same time, the episode shows the state of journalism and how the liberal media will find the story that they are looking for and report it, even if it is not really there.
