CBS News has been caught lying about the number of outraged complaints it received over a heavily criticized report it ran on Israel’s Christian population.
Yesterday, Christians United for Israel launched an email campaign urging supporters to clutter the inboxes of ‘60 Minutes’ reporter Bob Simon and other CBS News executives. In just over a day, supporters fired off more than 30,000 e-mails.
A CBS spokesperson, however, argued to Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin that the number is far less—a claim that is factually inaccurate, according to a screen shot of the third-party website that hosts CUFI’s e-mail monitoring system:
We received an organized negative email campaign of the type we don’t count because all of them were duplicates of the same letter sent from the same organization, Christians United for Israel, which apparently wrote the letter and urged others to resend it to CBS News. So far they number a few hundred, far less than 500 and well below what other such organized issue-based responses in the past have generated.
As Rubin notes in her report, CUFI’s third-party tracking company, Convio, provides on-screen evidence that CBS’ claim is untrue. (Some details have been blurred to protect CUFI users.)
As of this afternoon, 30,095 CUFI supporters have emailed CBS to complain about what they believe is its flawed reporting.