News broke early this week that Twitch streamer Hasan Piker had been detained at O’Hare Airport and questioned about his political beliefs by a Customs and Border Protection agent on a trip back from Paris. According to reports in the Washington Post, NBC News, CBS News, Associated Press, New York Times, BBC — and virtually every other mainstream outlet — Piker was either “questioned” or “detained” for two hours.

Detaining Piker on the basis of his political orientation would, indeed, be an alarming development. Piker is an American citizen and, no matter what his ideological beliefs, he has a constitutionally protected right to express them without fear of harassment or intimidation.

There’s only one problem with the reporting on it: a simple look at the actual timeline of events showed that he could not have been detained for two hours — the amount of time he was screened was, at most, just over 50 minutes. And the length of questioning was probably not more than 18 minutes, according to statements Hasan himself made. Regardless, in reporting this story (and we cringe to use that term in this context), the media unscrupulously stenographed Piker’s own claims, failed to corroborate them, and in effect, repeated — in unison — an unambiguous inaccuracy. This inaccuracy formed the sole basis of the hyperpartisan media coverage that followed — without it, a story of an 18-minute screening (at most) would not have been news — or views. Let’s dig in.

“[A] a CBP agent questioned [Piker] for about two hours about his job, his political affiliation, his opinion of Trump, and whether he had any connections to terrorist groups,” the Washington Post reported. Piker “said he was detained and questioned by federal authorities at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for more than two hours,” CBS News wrote. The Times included the claim in the article’s slug, writing, “Mr. Piker said he was questioned for two hours on topics including the war in Gaza and President Trump.” The AP went even further, saying Piker said he was questioned “for hours.”

But a simple examination of publicly available flight records, tweets, and public statements made by Piker show that, at most, the “detention” could not have exceeded 30 minutes (and was likely much shorter).

Streamer Dan Saltman assembled the timeline on X. It shows that Piker’s flight arrived at 4:22 p.m. Eastern Time. Piker said in his stream that he was flying “Sky Priority,” indicating his flight was either Delta or a Delta partner like Air France. There were only three flights from Charles De Gaulle to O’Hare that day, and only one of the three flights was a Delta or Delta affiliated flight, AF 0136, which landed at 4:22 p.m. Piker would have then disembarked and walked to the CBP check in O’Hare’s Terminal 5, which presumably could have taken no less than 15 minutes, if everything went perfectly (we are at 4:37 p.m. now).

At some point during the next 21 minutes, Piker texted his friend Lolo, who tweeted that Piker needed urgent legal assistance at 4:58 p.m. In his stream after the incident, Hasan said he waited to talk to an agent for 35 minutes (”because he left, went away for like 35 minutes, came back, and then he asked like actionable items”). At 5:30 p.m, Piker tweeted “it’s okay I’m out lol.”

The math here is simple. If Piker had been pulled aside at no earlier than 4:37 p.m. for screening, and was out of the screening at 5:30, the length of the detention, which included the period of waiting and the 35 minutes the agent was gone, could really have only been just over 50 minutes. (Again, assuming it took a generously fast 15 minutes to deplane, walk to the CBP screening area, and get through the line to a CBP agent.) Moreover, if those 53 minutes were mostly composed of waiting for the CBP agent for 35 minutes as Hasan said, he couldn’t have been questioned for more than 18 minutes.

Nevertheless:

• Pod Save America: “two hours’ worth of questions”

• CBS Chicago: “questioned for hours”

• BBC: “detained for hours”

• Washington Post: “a CBP agent questioned him for about two hours”

• Rolling Stone: “questioned for two hours”

• NBC News: “questioned for about two hours”

• The Guardian: “interviewed for nearly two hours”

• The Cut: “questioned for about two hours”

Apart from the endlessly repeated bald-faced inaccuracy, the amount of questioning here is not a trivial detail. Instead, it’s key to the truth of the matter. A two-hour-long interview is not a routine secondary screening, as CBP claimed it was. It’s an amount of time that implies clear overreach — enough time to drill an interviewee about their political beliefs, their work, their activities abroad: in other words, an interrogation. But there is just no way Hasan could have been questioned for two hours, given his own statements and tweets.

Not a single news outlet mentioned here appears to have attempted to corroborate Piker’s claims about a two-hour interview by CBP. Instead, they not only repeated his claims but, in most cases, did so without noting the claims had not been independently verified. The assertion that began with news reports repeating Piker’s claims flowed downstream to influential opinion outlets, including Pod Save America, who also repeated the claim in part of an outraged screed premised on the two-hour-long interview.

“I don’t know what else would have triggered an inspection that leads to two hours worth of questions about what you do for a living or what you believe about the Houthis,” Pod Save America co-host Jon Favraeu said in an interview with Piker.

Piker has avoided questions about the interview. But the real question here does not concern a streamer who has a strong incentive to turn a minor travel blip into a major breaking news story.

The issue, rather, concerns the phalanx of news organizations, who credulously amplified an unambiguous inaccuracy, turning it into a political narrative that paints American’s border policy under Trump as fascistic and unjust. Why were more probing questions not put to Piker? Why, in many of these reports, was there not even a note of caution added stating that Piker’s version of the event had not been verified?

I reached out to journalists via DM at the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News and Associated Press who reported this story to ask whether they had attempted to corroborate Piker’s version of events, and, if not, if the new information warrants a correction. As of time of writing, none of those outlets have responded to my request for comment.

—Ashley Rindsberg