The media dies in lies

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The Washington Post issued a mammoth correction this week on a story about Donald Trump’s search for election fraud. The paper had admitted that they misquoted the former president twice. WaPo’s botched story is a cautionary tale of what happens when political biases cloud reportage and a reminder of why public trust in the media is so low.

WaPo went ahead and published the story. This single-sourced ‘bombshell’ was then ‘confirmed’ by numerous other mainstream outlets, including CNN, the Associated Press and the New York Times. The AP cited ‘a source’, CNN relied on ‘a source with knowledge of the call’, and the NYT used ‘a state election official’ who ‘was not authorized to speak about the matter’.

The fact that WaPo bungled this story so thoroughly is disturbing by itself, but even worse is how it was then used by Democrats to support an impeachment charge. The House impeachment managers cited the WaPo report, including the fake quote, in its trial brief against the President. Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania later cited it in her oral argument during the actual impeachment trial. 

https://spectator.us/topic/washington-post-media-trump-georgia-call-election/

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Revealing the source of the quotes shows the Post had cause for more scrutiny, not less. According to the chairman of the Georgia Republican party, “The Secretary of State’s office secretly recorded the conversation, mischaracterized its contents to The Washington Post and then attempted to delete the recording. It was recently discovered in a laptop ‘trash’ folder as part of an open records search.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/16/washington-post-accuses-trump-of-a-crime-based-on-fabricated-quotes/#.YFClqPFbsxA.twitter

[DKW 86 7,437]

Okay, I read the whole long convoluted article. 

The WaPo did have the recording of one call and...IT was as bad as could be IMHO. Did they fail in doing a second source? Yes. Did they fail in getting a recording? Yes. Did they fail to verify that the first source was NOT EVEN ON THE CALL? Yes. WaPo failed, but maybe by not as great a margin as we thought. 

 She had already published the full audio of Trump’s call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, during which the then-president asked him to ‘find’ 11,000 votes and insisted they won the state by ‘hundreds of thousands of votes’. Fuchs’s description of Trump’s call with the election investigator likely rang true (as Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff infamously told MSNBC when questioned about inaccuracies in his book about the former president). Plus, it was another juicy anti-Trump scoop she could put under her belt.

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6 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

Okay, I read the whole long convoluted article. 

The WaPo did have the recording of one call and...IT was as bad as could be IMHO. Did they fail in doing a second source? Yes. Did they fail in getting a recording? Yes. Did they fail to verify that the first source was NOT EVEN ON THE CALL? Yes. WaPo failed, but maybe by not as great a margin as we thought. 

 She had already published the full audio of Trump’s call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, during which the then-president asked him to ‘find’ 11,000 votes and insisted they won the state by ‘hundreds of thousands of votes’. Fuchs’s description of Trump’s call with the election investigator likely rang true (as Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff infamously told MSNBC when questioned about inaccuracies in his book about the former president). Plus, it was another juicy anti-Trump scoop she could put under her belt.

The call that was misquoted was between Trump and Frances Watson, not Brad Raffensperger, and that’s call they tried to erase.  It makes a difference and WaPo, naturally, didn’t explain that.  That misquote was used in the impeachment of Trump in January.  Sad stuff.

The call that was misquoted by the WaPo was a conversation between Trump and Frances Trump instead urged the official, who The Wall Street Journal identifies as Frances Watson, to conduct a thorough investigation of Fulton County votes out of concern that “something bad happened” to ballots from the area. He also said she was doing the “most important job in the country right now.” No threats, no assertion of certain fraud, no suggestion that she rig a recount or anything else nefarious.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/16/washington-post-correction-tells-a-sordid-tale-of-agenda-driven-journalism/

 

[homersapien 11,416]

So bottom line, the WAPO mistakenly reported a paraphrase as a direct quote.  That's a serious mistake so they published a correction.  That's not something most right wing sites - such as Fox - would do.

Having said that, the discrepancy between what was original reported and the basic intent of what Trump actually said is relatively minor.  As the article below says, the real piece of news is that he made such a call in the first place.  The difference between the erroneous quote and what he actually said falls under the category of nuance.  Just like the time he was asking the Ukrainian president to "do him a favor", his intent was perfectly clear.  (And the last time I checked, he is still insisting he won the election.)

And to equate the WAPO to QAnon over such a (corrected) error is patently absurd. 

 

The Post publishes correction on Trump call with Georgia investigator

Opinion by

Erik Wemple

Media critic

March 16, 2021

 

On Jan. 9, The Post reported that then-President Donald Trump, in a call with Georgia’s lead elections investigator, Frances Watson, had instructed her to “find the fraud.” He mentioned that she could become a “national hero,” reported the newspaper.

In both cases, the quotes were wrong, as The Post has acknowledged in a correction to the story. “Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now,’” reads the correction, in part.

The story landed on top of a tumult with little equal in modern memory: Since Nov. 3, 2020, Trump and his allies have attempted to convince his supporters that Joe Biden stole the election. That lie provided the rhetorical impetus for Trump supporters to storm the Capitol in January just as Congress was taking up the electoral college results.

Evidence of Trump’s improper actions regarding those results piled up before and after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Here’s the timeline: On Jan. 2, Trump took part in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat.” The next day, Post reporter Amy Gardner surfaced a recording of that call. Then, on Jan. 9, Gardner broke the now-corrected story of Trump’s call with Watson, which had taken place on Dec. 23. Tracking the phone history of a malfeasant president is a big job.

In a time of much overblown chatter about election irregularities, this call between the president of the United States and a state-level investigator was the real irregularity. “That was an ongoing investigation,” Raffensperger told The Post at the time. “I don’t believe that an elected official should be involved in that process.”

The call happened; it was an abuse of presidential authority; and it failed to corrupt the investigators working under Raffensperger. But Trump wasn’t quite the plain-spoken rogue depicted in The Post’s story. We know this because the Wall Street Journal’s Cameron McWhirter last week published a recording of Trump’s six-minute call with Watson.

On the recording, there was no “find the fraud.” But there was this: “If you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable — the dishonesty,” said Trump.

There was no “national hero.” But there was this: “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised. … People will say, ‘Great.’ Because that’s what it’s about — that ability to check and to make it right,” Trump told Watson.

The Post’s account of the call rested on one source — “an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.” Though that source wasn’t identified in the Jan. 9 story, The Post did identify her in its follow-up based on the Wall Street Journal scoop: “The Washington Post reported on the substance of Trump’s Dec. 23 call in January, describing him saying that Watson should ‘find the fraud’ and that she would be a ‘national hero,’ based on an account from Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whom Watson briefed on his comments.”

In an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, Fuchs said, “I believe the story accurately reflected the investigator’s interpretation of the call. The only mistake here was in the direct quotes, and they should have been more of a summary.” Fuchs said that The Post disclosed her role in the story with her permission, and that she’d gotten the debriefing from the investigator — a direct report of hers — “shortly” after the call from Trump concluded.

“I think it’s pretty absurd for anybody to suggest that the president wasn’t urging the investigator to ‘find the fraud,’” Fuchs added, “These are quotes that [Watson] told me at the time.”

The New York Times quickly matched The Post’s reporting, including the inaccurate quotes. It added a correction on Monday. CNN has appended this editor’s note to its story: “An earlier version of this story, published January 9, presented paraphrasing of the President’s comments to the Georgia elections investigator as direct quotes. The story has been updated following the discovery of an audio recording of the call.” ABC News dealt with the issue via an editor’s note.

We asked The Post about claims that the newspaper’s action amounts to a retraction and about its reliance on one source for the quotes. In a statement, The Post responded:

We corrected the story and published a separate news story last week — at the top of our site and on the front page — after we learned that our source had not been precise in relaying then President Trump’s words. We are not retracting our January story because it conveyed the substance of Trump’s attempt to influence the work of Georgia’s elections investigators.

That, it did. Misreporting the words of the highest elected official in the land is a serious lapse — and one that, in this case, seems so unnecessary: The existence of the call itself is a towering exclusive. When it comes to phone calls, the only good sources are the ones who are dialed in. The former president’s partisans will attempt to memorialize The Post’s story as a fabrication or “fake news.” But a central fact remains: As the Journal’s recording attests, Trump behaved with all the crooked intent and suggestion that he brought to every other crisis of his presidency.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/16/washington-post-correction-trump-call-georgia-investigator/

 

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The Post knew the quote was incorrect and went with it anyway.  That quote was used in the impeachment trial of Trump. What would have happened if Trump would have been convicted and this information then was discovered?  The Post is suppose to be better than that and yes it is at the level of misinformation QAnon is famous for.

The lie just doesn’t register on the left’s fact checkers.

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5 hours ago, homersapien said:

So bottom line, the WAPO mistakenly reported a paraphrase as a direct quote.  That's a serious mistake so they published a correction.  That's not something most right wing sites - such as Fox - would do.

Having said that, the discrepancy between what was original reported and the basic intent of what Trump actually said is relatively minor.  As the article below says, the real piece of news is that he made such a call in the first place.  The difference between the erroneous quote and what he actually said falls under the category of nuance.  Just like the time he was asking the Ukrainian president to "do him a favor", his intent was perfectly clear.  (And the last time I checked, he is still insisting he won the election.)

And to equate the WAPO to QAnon over such a (corrected) error is patently absurd. 

 

The Post publishes correction on Trump call with Georgia investigator

Opinion by

Erik Wemple

Media critic

March 16, 2021

 

On Jan. 9, The Post reported that then-President Donald Trump, in a call with Georgia’s lead elections investigator, Frances Watson, had instructed her to “find the fraud.” He mentioned that she could become a “national hero,” reported the newspaper.

In both cases, the quotes were wrong, as The Post has acknowledged in a correction to the story. “Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now,’” reads the correction, in part.

The story landed on top of a tumult with little equal in modern memory: Since Nov. 3, 2020, Trump and his allies have attempted to convince his supporters that Joe Biden stole the election. That lie provided the rhetorical impetus for Trump supporters to storm the Capitol in January just as Congress was taking up the electoral college results.

Evidence of Trump’s improper actions regarding those results piled up before and after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Here’s the timeline: On Jan. 2, Trump took part in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat.” The next day, Post reporter Amy Gardner surfaced a recording of that call. Then, on Jan. 9, Gardner broke the now-corrected story of Trump’s call with Watson, which had taken place on Dec. 23. Tracking the phone history of a malfeasant president is a big job.

In a time of much overblown chatter about election irregularities, this call between the president of the United States and a state-level investigator was the real irregularity. “That was an ongoing investigation,” Raffensperger told The Post at the time. “I don’t believe that an elected official should be involved in that process.”

The call happened; it was an abuse of presidential authority; and it failed to corrupt the investigators working under Raffensperger. But Trump wasn’t quite the plain-spoken rogue depicted in The Post’s story. We know this because the Wall Street Journal’s Cameron McWhirter last week published a recording of Trump’s six-minute call with Watson.

On the recording, there was no “find the fraud.” But there was this: “If you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable — the dishonesty,” said Trump.

There was no “national hero.” But there was this: “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised. … People will say, ‘Great.’ Because that’s what it’s about — that ability to check and to make it right,” Trump told Watson.

The Post’s account of the call rested on one source — “an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.” Though that source wasn’t identified in the Jan. 9 story, The Post did identify her in its follow-up based on the Wall Street Journal scoop: “The Washington Post reported on the substance of Trump’s Dec. 23 call in January, describing him saying that Watson should ‘find the fraud’ and that she would be a ‘national hero,’ based on an account from Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whom Watson briefed on his comments.”

In an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, Fuchs said, “I believe the story accurately reflected the investigator’s interpretation of the call. The only mistake here was in the direct quotes, and they should have been more of a summary.” Fuchs said that The Post disclosed her role in the story with her permission, and that she’d gotten the debriefing from the investigator — a direct report of hers — “shortly” after the call from Trump concluded.

“I think it’s pretty absurd for anybody to suggest that the president wasn’t urging the investigator to ‘find the fraud,’” Fuchs added, “These are quotes that [Watson] told me at the time.”

The New York Times quickly matched The Post’s reporting, including the inaccurate quotes. It added a correction on Monday. CNN has appended this editor’s note to its story: “An earlier version of this story, published January 9, presented paraphrasing of the President’s comments to the Georgia elections investigator as direct quotes. The story has been updated following the discovery of an audio recording of the call.” ABC News dealt with the issue via an editor’s note.

We asked The Post about claims that the newspaper’s action amounts to a retraction and about its reliance on one source for the quotes. In a statement, The Post responded:

We corrected the story and published a separate news story last week — at the top of our site and on the front page — after we learned that our source had not been precise in relaying then President Trump’s words. We are not retracting our January story because it conveyed the substance of Trump’s attempt to influence the work of Georgia’s elections investigators.

That, it did. Misreporting the words of the highest elected official in the land is a serious lapse — and one that, in this case, seems so unnecessary: The existence of the call itself is a towering exclusive. When it comes to phone calls, the only good sources are the ones who are dialed in. The former president’s partisans will attempt to memorialize The Post’s story as a fabrication or “fake news.” But a central fact remains: As the Journal’s recording attests, Trump behaved with all the crooked intent and suggestion that he brought to every other crisis of his presidency.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/16/washington-post-correction-trump-call-georgia-investigator/

 

When you lie often and misrepresent intentionally as does the post, it is a big deal or at least should be if journalistic integrity is important. But thanks for your telling input, as if it told us anything we did not already know about you.

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Greenwald hits another out of the park.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often

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17 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

When you lie often and misrepresent intentionally as does the post, it is a big deal or at least should be if journalistic integrity is important. But thanks for your telling input, as if it told us anything we did not already know about you.

You seem to want to focus on this retraction, but you talk none about the fact that Trump did much worse than what was alleged in the original article after this was published.  There is enough evidence to indict Trump for election interference in Georgia.

"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/05/fact-check-trump-pressured-georgia-recalculate-vote-tally/4135556001/

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1 hour ago, AU9377 said:

You seem to want to focus on this retraction, but you talk none about the fact that Trump did much worse than what was alleged in the original article after this was published.  There is enough evidence to indict Trump for election interference in Georgia.

"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/05/fact-check-trump-pressured-georgia-recalculate-vote-tally/4135556001/

The focus of the articles I posted are on the retraction and journalistic integrity. Perhaps you should read them. If after doing so you have issues with content then contact the publications individually. 

If you want to start a thread on what you feel Trump did, be my guest. We can relive Russia and Ukraine too!

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46 minutes ago, AUFAN78 said:

The focus of the articles I posted are on the retraction and journalistic integrity. Perhaps you should read them. If after doing so you have issues with content then contact the publications individually. 

If you want to start a thread on what you feel Trump did, be my guest. We can relive Russia and Ukraine too!

At least you are consistent.  "What Trump did" is at the very core of the issue.  You want to claim a lack of journalistic integrity on the part of the newspaper that later retracted the original story.  Inherent in that claim is an assertion that the original article was done with some malice or intent to disparage Trump.  My point is that he did that all by himself soon thereafter, making the retracted piece an afterthought.

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48 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

At least you are consistent.  "What Trump did" is at the very core of the issue.  You want to claim a lack of journalistic integrity on the part of the newspaper that later retracted the original story.  Inherent in that claim is an assertion that the original article was done with some malice or intent to disparage Trump.  My point is that he did that all by himself soon thereafter, making the retracted piece an afterthought.

The media mentioned is consistent. There was a clear lack of journalistic integrity. In this particular case they lied intentionally. 

That they lied about Trump is not the issue. It's that they lied. Period.

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3 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

The media mentioned is consistent. There was a clear lack of journalistic integrity. In this particular case they lied intentionally. 

That they lied about Trump is not the issue. It's that they lied. Period.

Do you hold Fox News to that same standard?

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8 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

Do you hold Fox News to that same standard?

Give me a similar recent example. Let's discuss.

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16 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

Give me a similar recent example. Let's discuss.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?category=&ruling=false&speaker=sean-hannity

https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article249129510.html

Recent issues:

1. Fox claimed that Smartmatic voting machines rigged the election according to Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. Now that they have been sued, with Smartmatic filing a $2.7 Billion dollar lawsuit, Dobbs has been fired.  They have yet to retract the claims made that are patently false.

2. The 2020 lie of the year, according to Politifact, The downplaying and denial of Covid-19 and the seriousness of the virus.

https://khn.org/news/article/lie-of-the-year-the-downplay-and-denial-of-the-coronavirus/

I realize that the above two examples are much larger in scope, but that is why they are much more serious as well.  Shaping a narrative with lies is not the same as opinion based editorial journalism.

more...

https://www.politifact.com/article/2015/feb/26/fact-checks-behind-daily-shows-50-fox-news-lies/

When Murdoch Sr. dies, there will be changes made. Until then, he will use his money and influence to the detriment of truth.

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On 3/19/2021 at 12:19 PM, AU9377 said:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?category=&ruling=false&speaker=sean-hannity

https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article249129510.html

Recent issues:

1. Fox claimed that Smartmatic voting machines rigged the election according to Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. Now that they have been sued, with Smartmatic filing a $2.7 Billion dollar lawsuit, Dobbs has been fired.  They have yet to retract the claims made that are patently false.

2. The 2020 lie of the year, according to Politifact, The downplaying and denial of Covid-19 and the seriousness of the virus.

https://khn.org/news/article/lie-of-the-year-the-downplay-and-denial-of-the-coronavirus/

I realize that the above two examples are much larger in scope, but that is why they are much more serious as well.  Shaping a narrative with lies is not the same as opinion based editorial journalism.

more...

https://www.politifact.com/article/2015/feb/26/fact-checks-behind-daily-shows-50-fox-news-lies/

When Murdoch Sr. dies, there will be changes made. Until then, he will use his money and influence to the detriment of truth.

1. I'm on record here stating I did not buy election fraud. Well, not to the extent it would overturn the results/Biden victory.

2. I've never downplayed COVID and do not agree with those that do. Now I do believe there was much confusion in science early and do recall Fauci flip flopping mask wearing for example, but I think everyone was learning on the fly.

Quite certain you could go back to 2001 and find 50 "lies" by CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WAPO, etc. 

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2 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

1. I'm on record here stating I did not buy election fraud. Well, not to the extent it would overturn the results/Biden victory.

2. I've never downplayed COVID and do not agree with those that do. Now I do believe there was much confusion in science early and do recall Fauci flip flopping mask wearing for example, but I think everyone was learning on the fly.

Quite certain you could go back to 2001 and find 50 "lies" by CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WAPO, etc. 

During the 8 years Obama was President, at no time did he get a pass from the media to the extent given Trump by Fox, much less a nightly political pep rally.  I have seen the Fox prime time programming hosts begin their show by saying things like "The 45th President of the United States, the defender of freedom, Donald J. Trump, continued to make this country better today."  I remember stopping what I was doing and just laughing.  If that was all I listened to, I'm sure that I would buy into what they sell eventually.  CNN risks doing their own version of the polar opposite of Fox when Don Lemon is on, but he is the only purely partisan hack they have.  MSNBC is to the left of CNN and I don't watch them regularly.  I don't watch any of them religiously unless some major newsworthy event is taking place.