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The UCD graduate and Emmy winner on Elon Musk calling him a “liar”, misinformation in the US, and a COVID opportunity
CNN journalist Donie O’Sullivan, originally from Cahersiveen, County Kerry, studied History and Politics in UCD, but says he “poured most of my energy into the college newspaper. We had a lot of fun over those few years.” O’Sullivan reflects on the “lot of fun” he had before he graduated in 2012, “driving the Students’ Union and driving the university pretty crazy".
O’Sullivan wrote “one or two pieces” for The University Observer before becoming News Editor of The College Tribune, UCD’s independent student newspaper. After an MA in Political Science and Government at Queen’s University Belfast, O’Sullivan left the student newsroom and joined Storyful, a social media news agency founded during the Arab Spring in 2010 as the first social media newswire.
The Arab Spring was “one of the first major international stories where the first images were coming from people on the ground with smartphones posting videos and pictures rather than television crews,” O’Sullivan says. “People could upload a video and claim it was from Egypt that day when in fact it was from Libya a few weeks earlier”.
“Storyful was really about applying old-school journalistic methods to social media. We were figuring out where a video was shot, when it was shot, who filmed it and how we could contact the person who filmed it. I joke that it was like being a professional social media stalker for a few years.
O’Sullivan joined CNN in 2016 as a producer and brought the skill of sifting the truth from endless claims of sincere footage with him. “Any time a bomb would go off anywhere in the world, I’d be finding the video, making sure it was real and verifying everything,” he says.
In 2020, O’Sullivan moved from producer to correspondent. COVID had struck, most CNN staff could not travel, and Trump had continued holding rallies. O’Sullivan saw an opportunity. “I put my hand up and said: ‘I’m living here on my own. I don’t have to worry about infecting my parents, my kids or my wife when I come home. I’m happy to go out on the campaign trail’“.
O’Sullivan became more interested in the people at the rallies than the rallies themselves. “What fascinated me wasn’t really the politics. I kept hearing people at rallies say they didn’t believe COVID was real or that it wasn’t dangerous. Coming from my background covering misinformation, I became fascinated by where they were getting their information.”
“Even the people who are very distrustful of the media or openly hostile to journalists, most of the time they’ve agreed to sit down and talk to me for one reason or another. What I’ve found is that most people appreciate being heard. To be honest, most people are just people,” he says.
"Ignoring those conversations, or pretending they aren’t happening, doesn’t help anybody”.
In December 2022, Donie O’Sullivan was walking to CNN’s headquarters in New York in the US to appear on Anderson Cooper’s programme to discuss Elon Musk’s decision to suspend the account of a student tracking his private jet. Before making it to the studio, O’Sullivan had become part of the story.
“I was literally leaving my apartment to go to the studio when I realised my own account had been suspended because of the reporting I was doing,” he recalls. A few days later, l did not expect a reply but he got one from Musk himself. The message said: “Donie is a liar”.
“It was very strange to have the person running one of these companies actually taking the time to answer a press request,” O’Sullivan says. “So that was certainly memorable.”
Today, O’Sullivan is senior correspondent at CNN, winning an Emmy in 2025 for Outstanding Recorded News Program for MisinfoNation , a documentary strand which ran as part of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.
In the current climate the job comes with scrutiny. “I’d be lying to say it didn’t,” he says. “There were threats and things like that a few years ago, sometimes it could be very intense”.
O’Sullivan says he has learned to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. “When you know so much of [online scrutiny] is manufactured, and that one person can manufacture abuse from a hundred different accounts, it puts it into perspective".
These days, a stranger giving out to him online is almost a novelty. “I actually enjoy it. It’s something different,” he says but is quick to point out that his experience is not universal. “It’s much worse if you’re a woman, or if you’re not a white male journalist. I’ve seen this myself. Sometimes you’ll share a story with a female colleague, or you’ll both post the same thing on X, and the responses they receive are just really, really awful".
O’Sullivan has a simple message for hopeful journalists: “There are so many different ways into journalism. Keep creating your own work. You don’t have to wait for an internship at CNN or another major organisation before you start producing journalism. or people going into journalism, [criticism] is part of the job. Criticism comes with it. If nobody is giving out about your reporting, you’re probably doing something wrong”.