For cable news, UFO story has ratings payoff — and reporting pitfalls
Investigative reporter Ross Coulthart appeared on the fledgling cable station NewsNation last week with what seemed to be a bombshell scoop — and a warning.
A UFO whistleblower’s government personnel file had been leaked to a media outlet, he claimed, for a story that Coulthart darkly maintained was intended to scare off other inside sources from sharing their knowledge of the mysterious phenomenon.
“There should be an investigation,” he told host Chris Cuomo, into what he characterized as the intelligence community’s effort “to try and discredit a good human being.”
But when the story about David Grusch, star of the recent congressional UFO hearings, appeared the next day in the Intercept — revealing the retired Air Force intelligence officer’s 2018 stay in a psychiatric facility and his wife’s concern that he was an alcoholic — the sourcing proved to be much less sinister.
Rather than a leak of confidential personnel information by nefarious intelligence officials, Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein wrote that he learned of Grusch’s mental health crisis, and his alleged suicide threats that drew police attention, from documents obtained from a Virginia sheriff’s department through an open records request. NewsNation published a correction.
The episode highlighted the perils of covering one of the summer’s strangest and hardest-to-pin-down news narratives: murky new claims that the government knows more than it’s letting on about supposed “nonhuman” visitors to this planet.
Coulthart’s exclusive interview with Grusch in early June earned high ratings for NewsNation. The decorated Afghanistan combat veteran claimed in the broadcast that he had been told during his work with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that the United States possesses several spacecraft of unknown origin, including the bodies of pilots of an unknown species. Government officials say they have been unable to substantiate his claims.
In late July, on a day when other cable news channels focused on Hunter Biden’s collapsing plea deal, NewsNation carried the House Oversight Committee’s hearings on UFOs live — and quadrupled its ratings over the same time period a month earlier, according to Deadline. The network followed up with a two-hour special on the topic, “We Are Not Alone: The Historic UFO Hearings.” By then, even noted UFO enthusiast and superstar podcaster Joe Rogan was musing on his show that NewsNation spent “an inordinate amount of time on UFOs.”
In comments to a writer for Fortune.com around the same time, NewsNation’s president of news, Michael Corn, defended the coverage. “We are a news organization that doesn’t dismiss or shy away from any story,” he said. “Grusch’s claims are serious and fascinating — any way you slice it, that’s news.”
Launched in 2021, NewsNation has attempted to brand itself as a channel for moderate viewers turned off by the partisanship of other networks — though its still-modest ratings have raised questions about whether such an audience still exists for cable news. Many of its most prominent journalists — such as Cuomo, Ashleigh Banfield and Dan Abrams — are veterans of better-known networks.
NewsNation has mostly stuck to traditional cable-news fare, including town halls with long-shot presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and breaking coverage of the Maui wildfires. Not all of its ratings breakthroughs have come from UFO coverage: In July, for example, an episode of Cuomo’s show beat both Fox Business Network, which was running an episode of “Cops” at the time, and an episode of “Forensic Files” on HLN in total viewership, according to Nielsen Media Research data.
Still, UFO coverage has proved a valuable niche for NewsNation: Its “We Are Not Alone” special surpassed a LeBron James-produced documentary on CNN. The media monitoring service Critical Mention found that NewsNation broadcasts mentioned UFOs more than twice as much as CNN or MSNBC in July, though somewhat less than Fox News did.
“This just gets hits and clicks, and that’s what they’ve been doing,” said John Greenewald, a UFO researcher who has appeared on NewsNation as a guest.
UFO stories have also found a home on some of the other properties owned by NewsNation’s parent company, Nexstar Media Group. The Hill newspaper frequently covers UFO topics on its YouTube channel and hosted an online event about UFOs on Thursday. Reporter George Knapp, one of the most prominent journalists on the UFO beat since the late 1980s, works at a Nexstar-owned station in Las Vegas. The company also owns Knapp’s UFO news website, Mystery Wire.
Coulthart’s segment on Cuomo’s show launched a wave of anger at the Intercept. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) demanded punishment for the imagined leaker, while Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) tweeted out a call for military officials to be fired over the leaks. A NewsNation guest called the story “wholly domestic terrorism.”
By comparison, NewsNation rivals such as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC do not appear to have covered the Intercept story at all.
After Coulthart’s segment, Klippenstein and other Intercept staffers were bombarded with angry emails about their involvement in a supposed leak campaign, an Intercept spokesman said. “That assumption was quickly dispelled following the publication of our story.”
Asked about the Coulthart report and subsequent correction, a spokesperson for NewsNation directed more ire at the Intercept story, saying that The Washington Post’s question was “merely a distraction from a disgusting attempt to discredit a decorated veteran who served in the United States Air Force and suffered from PTSD, and a larger effort to minimize NewsNation’s exclusive reporting on an alleged secret military operation which has led to a congressional hearing on UFOs.”
Neither Grusch nor Coulthart responded to requests for comment.
Though Cuomo later conceded that the Intercept story didn’t come from an intelligence leaker, he called the publication’s response to the erroneous NewsNation report “high and mighty” and said its motives for the story were “suspicious at best.”
The clash continued days later when NewsNation anchor Elizabeth Vargas erroneously reported that Klippenstein had been fired from the Intercept — based on her misreading of a wry tweet from the writer. She later corrected herself, though she grumped that “this reporter has a history of pranks.” The NewsNation spokesperson called Klippenstein’s Twitter joke “unprofessional.”
In Greenewald’s view, Vargas’s error seemed to reflect NewsNation’s overeagerness to defend Grusch — and, by extension, its high-profile interview with him. “To me, that’s just careless,” he said.
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