Bulgaria News
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CBS News got raked over the coals Monday for a tweet about the death of former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), for framing his biography in a way critics said downplayed the most infamous part of his bio — his guilty plea on banking charges that included an admission that he had molested underage boys while working as a high school wrestling coach.
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Hastert, 84, died of natural causes over the weekend at his Plano, Illinois home, according to a press release from the Kendall County Coroner’s Office.
The headline on CBS News’ report on Hastert’s death was unremarkable — “Dennis Hastert, disgraced former House speaker, dies at 84” — but the way the article was originally posted on social media drew a flood of criticism and mockery.
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The caption on the tweet, now deleted, read, “Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who represented Illinois for two decades in Congress and was later jailed for violating banking laws, has died.”
Screenshot via X.
Every word of that is technically accurate, but as a Community Note and numerous commenters pointed out, it was far from the whole story.
Hastert’s political career began with several terms in the Illinois House of Representatives before being elected to the U.S. House in 1986. He was re-elected every two years and served as Speaker from 1999 until 2007, when he resigned after Democrats took the majority.
After leaving Congress, Hastert was a lobbyist with the D.C.-based firm Dickstein Shapiro until he was arrested in 2015 on federal charges for structuring bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements and for making false statements to federal investigators. Prosecutors said that the withdrawals were used as hush money payments to men who had accused him of molesting them when Hastert was a high school wrestling coach and they were underage students, as young as 14 years old.
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Prosecutors did not pursue sex abuse charges against Hastert because the statute of limitations had run, but he did agree to plead guilty to the banking charges and admitted to sexually abusing the boys while he was a coach.
At the sentencing hearing, the judge called Hastert a “serial child molester.” Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison, a $250,000 fine, and he had to participate in a sex offender program. He served his sentence and was released in 2017.
CBS News deleted the tweet and posted a new one that quoted the article’s headline and noted that the original version had “missed the mark.”
“Dennis Hastert, the disgraced former GOP Speaker of the House, died earlier today at 84,” the post said. “A prior version of this post stated that Hastert was jailed for violating banking laws. That post missed the mark. Hastert was jailed on charges related to his concealment of hush money payments made to cover up sexual abuse.”
Screenshots are forever, and the first CBS News tweet made the rounds online, with many people writing their own versions of downplayed obituaries for criminals, terrorists, and other notorious people.
NBC News posted a similar tweet that omitted the child molestation accusations, with a caption that read, “BREAKING: Disgraced former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who served prison time in hush money case, dies at 84.”
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NBC News received some criticism for this post, but less than the CBS News tweet, and it has not been deleted.
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A sampling of reactions to the CBS News and NBC News tweets about Hastert is below.
