‘I Screwed Up Royally’: Young Turks Co-Host Ana Kasparian Apologizes for Past Reporting on Rebekah Jones

The Young Turks‘ Ana Kasparian apologized for amplifying the narrative of former Florida Department of Health employee Rebekah Jones in an extended segment on Wednesday, professing to have “screwed up royally” in her reporting and commentary about Jones.

Jones was fired from her job of managing the Sunshine State’s Covid dashboard in May 2020 after she repeatedly spoke to the press about it without authorization, locked other employees out of the dashboard, and even crashed it at one point. But she parlayed her firing into a years-long fundraising grift after claiming to have been canned for refusing to understate the number of deaths Covid deaths in Florida.

Jones followed that lie with many more, claiming that authorities had executed a shock-and-awe raid on her family home. That claim — like so many of her other allegations — was disproven, in that particular case, by police body-cam footage. Yet, it continued to be repeated by media outlets and personalities eager to make a villain out of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

After walking through several of Jones’s most ambitious mistruths, as well as her most recent one — Jones claimed that her son had been kidnapped by authorities even though she herself turned him in for threatening to shoot up a school — Kasparian issued an apology on behalf of herself and TYT:

I want to correct all of those errors that we had previously reported. And I want to be clear that out of everyone who works on the main show, the only person who should be held responsible for that is me. I’m the executive producer of the show and I screwed up royally.

And part of the reason why I screwed up is because I had all of these biases, of course, against Ron DeSantis. And I don’t really feel bad about that because I think Ron DeSantis has done some pretty terrible things in the state of Florida, but it becomes a problem when that bias blinds you to what the facts of various stories happen to be.

And I should have done my due diligence, I failed to do so, and by failing to do so, I feel like I misled the audience into thinking that Rebekah Jones was some sort of hero.

Kasparian went on to lament that some proportion of TYT‘s audience may have been compelled to donate to Jones as a result of its credulous coverage of her. Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through various online fundraisers.

Watch above via Sean Fitzgerald on Twitter.