Did CBS Fake COVID Patient Testing?
Project Veritas head James O'Keefe posted a video in which he claims that CBS News used fake patients to make it appear that a COVID-19 testing site was busier than it was.
This is the tweet he posted with edited audio:
On their website, Project Veritas writes that the “CBS News crew pulled medical professionals off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to line up in their vehicles so a CBS film crew would have a long line for their COVID-19 coverage.”
CBS released a statement saying they did not fake anything for their report:
CBS News did not stage anything at the Cherry Health facility. Any suggestion to the contrary is 100% false. These allegations are alarming. We reached out to Cherry Health to address them immediately. They informed us for the first time that one of their chief officers told at least one staffer to get in the testing line along with real patients. No one from CBS News had any knowledge of this before tonight. They also said that their actions did not prevent any actual patients from being tested. We take the accuracy of our reporting very seriously and we are removing the Cherry Health portion from the piece.