WATCH: CNN panel diagnoses mainstream media's problem, explains why America doesn't trust them

A CNN panel lambasted TIME magazine on Friday over the publication's dishonest magazine cover that drove outrage over the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" border policy by deceitfully depicting a 2-year-old crying Honduran girl as being separated from her mother.

The cover's depiction, which showed the girl cowering to President Donald Trump, was dishonest because the actual girl in the viral image was never separated from her mother. In fact, according to the photographer who took the photo, the girl cried because her mother was being detained for illegally entering the U.S.

Indeed, the girl's father later verified that the girl was never separated from her mother and that the two were safe at a detention center in the U.S.

What did the panel say?

Despite outrage over the policy, which the media has partially driven, the CNN panel, consisting of CNN's Mary Katherine Ham and Jackie Kucinich, was only interested in honest dialogue.

The women concluded that what TIME did was wrong — and it only further drives a wedge between mainstream America and the media.

"Not just Republicans should pounce, media should pounce, Democrats should pounce, because when you make someone the emblem of a problem in a land where people have a lot of suspicions about media coverage and think this might be somebody messing with them or exaggerating a problem that existed in a different capacity under Obama,” Ham said.

"Then yeah, when you put that person as the symbol and it turns out she is not affected by that policy and was in fact not separated and her mother was a repeat offender coming over the border again...yes people are going to wonder if you're lying to them about other things," Ham added.

Kucinich agreed with Ham's analysis.

"It is infuriating that this happened because it hurts all media, it hurts all media," she said. "And the fact that this story about this little girl was too good to check — DO BETTER!"