"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on" is the familiar saying apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill, and it's indubitably true in this internet age. Today's winner is National Review's Charlie Cooke for a thoroughly-researched debunking of one of the most prevalent bits of misinformation to arise during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In a May 13 article titled “Rebekah Jones, the COVID Whistleblower Who Wasn’t,” Cooke effectively showed how Jones, the former “dashboard manager” of the Florida Department of Health, single-handedly advanced the conspiracy theory that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had been fudging the state’s COVID-19 data.

Cooke dismantled Jones' accusations one-by-one, including her false claims about a search warrant executed at her home. As Cooke pointed out on Monday's episode of Morning Joe, he made his findings with readily-available public information that anyone could have found, but he's the one who took the time to do it. "There is nothing special about me," Cooke insisted, but in this era of social-media-fueled misinformation, diligent fact-checking is a vital journalistic function, and Cooke deserves kudos.

CNN had a major headache this weekend when it was discovered that Adeel Raja, a freelance writer based  in Islamabad, Pakistan, tweeted “The world today needs a Hitler,” along with multiple other tweets that praised Adolf Hitler or included other anti-Semitic content.

Raja had been a contributor at CNN since 2013, with his byline on approximately 50 articles. Reached for comment, CNN spokesman Matt Dornic told Mediaite that "in light of these abhorrent statements, [Raja] will not be working with CNN again in any capacity.”

Permanently cutting ties with Raja was the right move, and we recognize that it's tough to monitor the social media accounts for CNN's entire network of contributors, but this was a very blatant transgression that CNN doesn't want associated with their brand.

With AT&T spinning off CNN's parent company WarnerMedia to merge with Discovery, it's a really bad time for this type of snafu for the network, and there are some long hours ahead for whoever is scanning thousands of tweets and Facebook posts to see what other messes might be out there.