Even by our more generous definition, the media have put out a massive pile of some seriously false news about Trump that they’ve been forced to correct. The public humiliation infuriates them, especially when they’ve had to demote or fire employees. Around the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, someone in the Trump administration had a brilliant idea. The president proclaimed that he would cobble together a list of the worst fake news stories of 2017. The media went bonkers. The New York Times warned that the hubbub over a list “alarmed advocates of press freedom and heartened his political base.” There you had it. On one side, the forces of freedom; on the other, supporters of Donald Trump.
The Media Research Center’s blog site, NewsBusters, released its own list: the “Eight Times the Liberal Media Screwed Up on Trump-Russia in 2017.” So many were fixated on Russia, putting the cart in front of the horse in trying to prove that Trump’s election was imposed by Moscow. What about Hillary’s connection to Russia (see the Uranium One deal)?
Here are the examples found in the report.
• CNN filed an explosive online report that claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the head of a massive Russian investment fund who met with Trump pal Anthony Scaramucci before Inauguration Day. The CNN story speculated that the two might have discussed the new administration lifting Russian sanctions—a tidbit that, if true, would have potentially big financial benefits to the investment fund.
The story cited only a single anonymous source, which showed how flimsy it was. And then it fell apart completely. By the next day, visitors to CNN’s web page found a giant “Editor’s Note” explaining that the story “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted. . . . CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.” The problem is that this story most certainly did meet their standards.
The three “investigative reporters” at CNN were fired.
• ABC’s chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross, made the jaw-dropping claim that Trump’s first (and quickly fired) national security advisor, Michael Flynn, would testify that during the 2016 campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump had “ordered him—directed him to make contact with the Russians, which contradicts all that Donald Trump has said to this point.”
If true, that conceivably would have put the president in legal jeopardy. Within minutes, Ross’s report was being parroted across the national media, and the stock market fell more than 300 points. But it turned out that Ross had committed the biggest blunder of his career. Ross clarified hours later that Trump made the alleged request of Flynn not as a candidate but after he was elected—which made it a routine act of a transition team, not collusion.
ABC put out a statement: “We deeply regret and apologize for the serious error we made yesterday. The reporting conveyed by Brian Ross during the special report had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.” ABC suspended Ross for a month without pay and barred him from covering President Trump in the future. He later left ABC in disgrace.
• Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey (speaking of disgraces) was widely hyped as the opening scene of a new Watergate or worse. Previewing a congressional hearing that would star Comey, both ABC and CNN claimed that Comey would specifically dispute Trump’s statement that he told the President “on three separate occasions, that I’m not under investigation.”
If this was true, Trump would have been lying about being a target of the investigation. Two days later, Comey said exactly the opposite, confirming that he had assured the President that he was not under investigation. Both CNN and ABC updated their web stories, but ABC never told viewers on television—that’s where viewers had been misled—that its reporting was 100 percent fake news.
• A “bombshell” New York Times story had reported that “phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election” and particularly around the time of the e-mail hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
If true, this wasn’t contact just with Russians but with Russian spies. But as usual the Times had next to nothing but fog. Get a load of this sentence: “The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians.”
In his Senate hearings, Senator Jim Risch (R–Idaho) asked Comey directly about the Times story and whether it was “a fair statement” to declare it was “not true.” Comey responded, “In the main, it was not true.” He added emphasis: “The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, about writing on classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it. And we don’t call the press and say, ‘Hey, you got that thing wrong.’”
Leakers may not be experts. Imagine that!
Yet the New York Times refused to withdraw its claim, noting in its write-up only that “Mr. Comey did not say exactly what he believed was incorrect about the article” and that the paper’s anonymous sources still stood by their claims. “The original sources could not immediately be reached after Mr. Comey’s remarks, but in the months since the article was published, they have indicated that they believed the account was solid.”
This from the newspaper whose commercials during the 2017 Oscars insisted “The truth is more important than ever.”
• CNN published an early-morning story claiming that Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and other Trump employees received an e-mail containing a “decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents” on September 4, 2016, nine days before they were publicly revealed on September 13.
If true, that would demonstrate a secret collusion between the campaign and WikiLeaks. Ooooops. Actually, the e-mail was dated ten days later, September 14, after the information was made available publicly.
But this was exposed only after CNN spent most of a day proudly touting a “BREAKING NEWS” banner and “CNN Exclusive” that claimed, “Emails Reveal Effort to Give Trump Campaign Wikileaks Documents.” CNN had to announce an on-air correction but insisted that the cooks of this half-baked story had “followed the editorial standards process.” Some process.
• Bloomberg News claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “issued a subpoena” to Deutsche Bank that “zeroed in” on President Trump personally. Their explosive headline: “Mueller Subpoenas Trump’s Deutsche Bank Records, Source Says.” After a cable-news frenzy over the mere thought of Mueller reaching into Trump’s personal finances, Bloomberg had to backpedal, as the request was apparently not for the President’s personal records but more vaguely for “documents and data related to people or entities affiliated with Trump.”
• NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander sent the media into a frenzy when he tweeted “BREAKING” news that the U.S. Treasury Department had announced it would, in his words, “allow some companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, aka fmr [sic] KGB.” Alexander then phoned in to MSNBC, where the screaming headline claimed that the new administration was “easing U.S. sanctions on Russia.”
Except that the sanctions weren’t being eased. It was only a “technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid any unintended consequences of cybersanctions,” as an embarrassed Alexander noted in a follow-up tweet later in the day.
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