Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List

Sharyl Attkisson   Updated May 16, 2020

"We the media have "fact-checked" President Trump like we have fact-checked no other human being on the planet, and he's certainly given us plenty to write about. That's probably why it's so easy to find lists enumerating and examining his mistakes, missteps and "lies."

 "But as self-appointed arbiters of truth, we've largely excused our own unprecedented string of fact-challenged reporting. The truth is, formerly well-respected, top news organizations are making repeat, unforced errors in numbers that were unheard of just a couple of years ago.

 "Our repeat mistakes involve declaring that Trump's claims are "lies" when they are matters of opinion, or when the truth between conflicting sources is unknowable; taking Trump's statements and events out of context; reporting secondhand accounts against Trump without attribution as if they're established fact; relying on untruthful, conflicted sources; and presenting reporter opinions in news stories, without labeling them as opinions.

"What's worse, we defend ourselves by trying to convince the public that our mistakes are actually a virtue because we (sometimes) correct them. Or we blame Trump for why we're getting so much wrong. Is a little bit like a police officer taking someone to jail for DUI, then driving home drunk himself: he may be correct to arrest the suspect, but he should certainly know better than to commit the same violation.

 "So since nobody else has compiled an updated, extensive list of this kind, here are: 

 Notable Mistakes and Missteps in Major Media Reporting on Donald Trump

. . . "52. June 21, 2018; Time magazine and others used a photo of a crying Honduran child to illustrate a supposed Trump administration policy separating illegal immigrant parents and children. The child's father later reported that agents had never separated her from her mother; the mother had taken her to the US without his knowledge and separated herself from her other children, whom she left behind.

Earth to Media: 10 Black Conservatives Condemn Biden’s ‘You Ain’t Black’ Insult

Fox News Contributor Deneen Borelli said she was insulted by Biden’s gaffe and tweeted a video of her response to the former VP. She claimed, “Joe Biden says you’re not black if you don’t vote for him. Well, Joe Biden, as a black woman, I am outraged by your ridiculous comments and this independent black woman won’t be voting for you.”

MRC  "Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden made one of the biggest gaffes of his 2020 campaign by letting it slip just how much he takes the African-American community for granted. Prominent African-American conservatives swiftly condemned his disgusting comments.

"As The Breakfast Club radio host “Charlamagne Tha God” signed off on his interview with the Dem nominee, he claimed he still had “more questions” about how Biden would benefit the African-American community. That wasn’t enough of a pledge for the indignant candidate, who responded by saying, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

"Following the offensive blunder, 10 prominent African-American conservatives slammed the callous comment on behalf of the “1.3 million” black Americans who supported President Trump in 2016, and the “millions” more who will be supporting him in 2020. Black conservative leaders like HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and commentator Candace Owens called Biden’s words “racist,” “condescending,” “short-sighted” and “entitled.”

"Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson commented on Biden's gaffe, tweeting, “It is disheartening to see that some in this country still believe that African Americans are beholden to one political ideology at birth, due to the color of their skin.”

"In a subsequent tweet he added, “In reality, ideals like the freedom of thought, resilience, and self-determination have guided the black community through the darkest of times. It is these principles, not pandering, that will continue to lead us to the mountaintop.' ” . . .

Turns out 'Central Park Karen' was an Obama and Buttigieg donor

"Any time anything bad happens, Trump's supporters did it. Nobody's apologizing for that nonsense. The people who got smeared in this instance, for sure, were the Trumpsters. Call it left-skin privilege. Where's the lefty apology on that?"

Image by Mike Harris

Monica Showalter  "A white woman who got into an incredibly stupid altercation with a black man in the wilds of Central Park over her inexplicable refusal to put her dog on a leash as he politely asked and the park rules required, and then threatened to call the cops on him, pretty well did herself in. After getting herself on film in the throes of her episode, and seeing it go viral, Amy Cooper lost her $170,000 a year job at Franklin Templeton, any prospect of employment afterward, her reputation, and even her dog. And sure enough, her lowly dog walker was the one who turned her in. 

"It was rough justice for sure, given what she did, but she knew the rules of living in New York. Tom Wolfe's Sherman McCoy pretty well mansplained it. For being a 'Karen,' or entitled white woman as the annoying term now means, she's now a Sherman. As for the black man, Christian Cooper (no relation), he was unjustly treated, too, given that the woman was trying to call the cops on him and counting on the cops to believe her over him, and she was lying about being 'threatened.' The only creature who got a real scare from that encounter was the poor yelping dog.

. . .  "Leftists pounced on the matter and splatted all over the internet that this foolish woman was a Trump supporter. Here's one of them, per the Independent of London:

"Actually, she was a liberal. Just like everyone else in that picture. She'd voted for Barack Obama twice. She was a big fan of Hillary Clinton. She donated money to the John Kerry and Pete Buttigieg campaigns. She went to the now-left-wing University of Chicago." . . .

More on "Karens" here

What does it mean to be a ‘Karen’? Karens explain  "According to a popular meme, Karen is a middle-aged white woman with an asymmetrical bob asking to speak to the manager, who happens to be as entitled as she is ignorant."
What about a "Maxine"?

In the end, it is the face mask that is the clearest symbol of America’s divide

Heroes of the left, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have been wrong, wrong, wrong.  Long ago the great Thomas Sowell wrote that “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” 

pixabay

Patricia McCarthy  "There have been several great columns on the debate over mask-wearing in public.  Scott McKay at American Spectator explains why the mask is essentially useless:  The mask is not an adequate defense against the COVID-19 virus, gang. The virus checks in at somewhere between 0.06 and 0.14 microns, meaning it’s too small for any commercially available mask to effectively filter it out. The pores on an N95 mask, which are the best masks you’re reasonably going to find, and the vast, vast majority of you are not going to have N95 masks but rather cloth masks, which perform far less well, are 0.3 microns.”  Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker  writes about how “wearing face masks has become a cultural divide….On the left, mask wearing has become a basic marker of good citizenship, no matter how silly it may be…' ”  
"Then on Tuesday at the Federalist, David Marcus astutely observes that the mask has become the political symbol of 2020.  Indeed it has.  In Staten Island a mob of “karens” forced a woman from a store for not wearing a mask and they were not at all polite about it; they were vicious. " . . . 

Jon Gabriel gives a good accounting of the two types of people who have been revealed since the virus came to visit, “karens” and “sharons.”  That would be the ones who virtue-signal by shaming anyone not wearing a mask and those who live and let live.

MSNBC, the darling of "Law & Order" gets busted by passer-by; many comments ensue

MSNBC Gets Busted While Virtue Signaling About Masks On Air

I missed this MSNBC fail yesterday
Katy Tur tells reporter, "It seems like you might be one of the only people wearing a mask"
Reporter: You can see here, nobody's wearing them. Katy.
Hero bystander: Including the cameraman.
Defeated reporter: Including the cameraman.

 Mask-Obsessed NBC Reporter Forced to Admit on Live TV Cameraman Not Wearing a Mask   . . . "As Perry was wrapping up the segment, a bystander recording on his phone also noted that his cameraman was also not wearing a mask, which Perry acknowledged." . . . 

Unmasked: MSNBC’s Double-Standard, Elitist, Mask-Shaming Faceplant

Passer-by video  . . . "This doesn’t bode well for future live reports from Flyover Country. These days, everyone has a camera and the ability to report on the reporters. Media outlets should think twice about their next “the hicks in the sticks are thick as bricks” segment. If they want to make a point about wearing masks, maybe they should just follow Sean Hannity’s example and be honest about it. Honesty and respect at least have the novelty of not having been tried on MSNBC." . . .

MSNBC phony mask-shaming busted on live TV  . . . "If you love seeing progressive, phony propagandists devastatingly embarrassed, this video, less than a minute in length, is a moment to save and savor." . . .

MSNBC Had a Reporter On to Shame People Over Masks, Then Something Amazing Happened

Enough of this nonsense. Stop shaming people for going outside and trying to live their lives. The virus doesn’t spread outdoors to any real degree anyway. There is no reason to wear a mask when you are walking on a sidewalk. The media continue to show themselves to be buffoons.

.terrellaftermath/

The Obama People Turned the Whole Philosophy of the American Founding Upside Down. Not Because They're Evil, but Because They're Idiots.

Christopher Chantrill  "I think it is pretty clear now to all but the most klueless, given the bombshells and walls closing in of the past week, that the whole Trump Russia thing was a put-up job, that the Obama people, whether prompted by the Clinton campaign or President Obama himself, spied on the Trump campaign on a presumption about Russian spying. Predicates? We don’t need no stinkin’ predicates.
"And the latest line on the pursuit of Michael Flynn is that he had dirt on the Obama Iran Deal and wanted to clean out the Augean stables at the intelligence community. So he had to be eliminated.
"Here’s my objection to the whole Russia/Flynn thing.
"Rule One, for me, is that We give the guys in the Other party the benefit of the doubt. We do not investigate Them, or trap Them, or leak IC information on Them to the media. Why not? Because We are the smart ones; we know the day will come when They will do it to Us. And We won’t like that.
"If you ask me, that was really the bigger question in the McCarthy era, and why the liberals were right for the wrong reasons back then. So Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss were spying for the Russians. They weren’t crazy radicals, but establishment figures, members of the ruling class. I expect that their “helping” Soviet Russia was almost conventional wisdom in progressive circles back in the 1930s and 1940s. Bottom line: When a significant sector of the ruling class thinks that “colluding” with Russia is the okay thing to do -- even if that means winking at the transfer of atomic secrets -- then that is the political status quo, even if Tailgunner Joe don’t like it.
"But now, 70 years later, collusion with the Russians is scandalous and traitorous, because something-or-other? Please. Tailgunner Joe got sent to the corner for that.
"The way we know that the Obama people were up to no good is what they did not do with Russia and Flynn. They did not call up the Trump campaign and say, with respect to Russia, that some of the Trump people were fishing in dangerous waters. Why not, if their purpose was to help America and not conspire to damage Trump?
"And President Obama did not tell president-elect Trump what his real beef was with LTG Flynn when, as Lee Smith writes, he called Trump two days after the 2016 election to warn him about Flynn. “Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning.” No doubt, because Obama wasn’t leveling with him." . . . Read more...

The Remains of an Administration; Obama’s policies are in tatters, and the worst scandals of his White House are coming to light.

Victor Davis Hanson

 Obama entered office to gushes that he was a living god and the smartest man ever to enter the White House. He quickly won the Nobel Peace Prize and was courted internationally through a series of overseas tours. His brand was that he was not so much a citizen of an unexceptional America as a citizen of the now globalized world.

     "Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.

     "After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list is so overwhelming and bizarre that it ensures that anything at any time can now appear. And the result keeps reminding Americans of how corrupt were the years between 2009 and 2017 and how untruthful was the coverage of such institutionalized wrongdoing.
     "Emeritus Barack Obama now and then ventures out to go through the motions of an enfeebled defense for what is becoming an increasingly discredited administration. But his heart is not in it. His mind is elsewhere. His cause is no longer social activism and community organizing, if it ever was, but lucre and the perceived well-earned good life. The arc of his moralizing universe is long, but for the anointed like him, it apparently bends toward the just deserts of riches and material bounty.
     "First lady forever and bestselling memoirist Michelle Obama sometimes takes a hiatus from making millions to offer a half-hearted progressive warning about the sudden heartlessness of the country — reminiscent of her transitory 2008 warnings about a downright mean country and one of which she had previously not been especially proud." . . .

Boom: Kayleigh McEnany Dropkicks Chris Wallace Over Suggestion That Journalists Shouldn’t Be Questioned

RedState

“Journalism is a great and noble profession but there’s been a dearth of journalists asking the real questions for President Obama, the criminal leak of Michael Flynn’s identity, who leaked that identity, the dossier used to launch a three year investigation into this president to spy on his campaign why aren’t those questions being asked?”“It’s journalistic malpractice not to ask those questions,” McEnany concluded.

"Yesterday, my RedState colleague Bonchie wrote about how Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and former National Review editor Jonah Goldberg bashed White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany Sunday for not only asking journalists at the Friday press briefing about their lack of curiosity over Gen. Michael Flynn’s unmasking, but for also pointing out that it seemed like they didn’t want churches to reopen.

"McEnany’s turning the tables on the notoriously combative, left-wing White House press corps earned her a “Twitter troll” designation by Goldberg, who stated that he believed her behavior was “indefensible and grotesque.” Wallace teed up the segment by suggesting that if McEnany “had told” him and former ABC News journalist Sam Donaldson “what questions” they should have asked during a briefing, that it “would not have gone well.”

"Their criticisms were absurd for many reasons, as Bonchie explained well in his post, but McEnany herself was asked about them during a Fox and Friends interview this morning, and she did not hold back:" . . .

Against Faux-Feminists Who Deny the Rights of Muslim Women and Jews

Women’s studies associations, national feminist organizations—many feminist Jews—are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” Phyllis Chesler

Phyllis Chesler 
Why today’s postmodern postcolonial feminism avoids the true front lines of the battle for women’s rights

. . .  "Like other American radical feminists, I was active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements. Unlike other feminists, I had “once lived in a harem in Afghanistan.” This is the opening line of my book, An American Bride in Kabul. Quite unexpectedly, I lived in a polygamous household in very posh purdah—which meant I was not allowed out without a male escort. Quite surprisingly, my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children—facts my Westernized husband failed to mention during our long American college courtship.
. . . "I can tell you that anti-Semitism—Jew-hatred—is not new among feminists. I first encountered it in the early 1970s among radical feminists and lesbians and, together with Aviva Cantor and Cheryl Moch, immediately began exposing it.
     "However, a new and what I describe as a “faux feminism” has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and postcolonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism as the greatest danger to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason; an intersectional “faux feminism” that condemns only Western imperialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism, and religious and gender apartheid; a “faux feminism” that is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, minds, and genitalia world-wide–including those women who are being forcibly face-veiled, death-threatened, and honor killed in the disputed territories." . . . More...

Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology at City University of New York. She is a best-selling author, a legendary feminist leader, a retired psychotherapist and expert courtroom witness. She has lectured and organized political, legal, religious, and human rights campaigns in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and the Far East. Her work has been translated into many European languages and into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.

The general election scenario that Democrats are dreading

weforum.org

Politico
"We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country," says a top former economic adviser to Obama.

. . . "This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”
"And top policy officials on the Biden campaign are preparing for a fall economic debate that might look very different than the one predicted at the start of the pandemic in March. “They are very much aware of this,” said an informal adviser.
"Furman’s case begins with the premise that the 2020 pandemic-triggered economic collapse is categorically different than the Great Depression or the Great Recession, which both had slow, grinding recoveries.
"Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound." . . .

Joe Biden Says He Will Kill High-Paying Jobs Created By Keystone XL Pipeline…

Is Biden a racist if he doesn't choose Stacey Abrams?

Image by Dianny of Patriot Retort

Is Biden a racist if he doesn't choose Stacey Abrams?  "We hear a lot of talk about whom Joe Biden might choose to be his vice presidential running mate.  One prominent name being bandied about is Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who lost the 2018 gubernatorial race to Republican Brian Kemp.  In fact, the former Georgia state rep. and minority leader of the Georgia House lost by about 55,000 votes.  However, in this topsy-turvy era of hyperbolic rhetoric, those on the left who lose an election can simply claim that it was stolen from them by voter suppression.  Abrams, taking a page from the Hilary Clinton "I got robbed" playbook, continues to promulgate the narcissistic folly that she is actually the governor of the Peach State.

"Moreover, if anyone disagrees with her, she declares him to be a (you guessed it) "racist."  This tactic is so old and mendacious that it's become laughable. It's used only by losers who can't deal with the fact that voters weren't able to recognize their obvious talents (sarcasm inserted).  I suppose the next best thing to winning is lamenting that you would have won if the system were fair.  It must be working, because Abrams has received more publicity for losing than Kemp has for winning.  Furthermore, the notion that she's veep timber is the left's way of pushing the notion that she actually won.  How often have we heard that winning is unfair to the losers?" . . .

Cooking the Books on COVID-19 Deaths

Aftermath

Brian C.Joondeph, MD  . . . "Most peoples’ moods are already melancholic over the unending economic shutdown, along with social distancing, masks, and restrictions on movement and assembly not normally seen in free societies. Why don’t news networks show a tally of recovered patients rather than deaths?
"Aside from the morbid, “If it bleeds, it leads” mantra that guides much news reporting, the media wants to pin each death on the tail of President Trump. Twitter has a #TrumpDeathCount hashtag to blame every single death on the president, the more the merrier. This is ahead of the fall presidential campaign where Democrats will attempt to blame the entire Wuhan virus mess on Trump, from the economic devastation to the total number of deaths.
"If more deaths are better for the Democrat and media narrative, expect to see inflated death counts, erroneously blaming non-virus deaths on the virus. The left is practiced at this since every type of extreme weather, from rain to snow, heat to cold, hurricanes to tornadoes, is blamed on global warming or climate change, depending on which term fits the weather in question.

"As states and cities reopen, expect each new death to be trumpeted by the media, with panel discussion by “experts” discussing Trump’s recklessness and disregard for American lives." . . .

MSM reporting of US COVID 19 mortality rate: An exercise in ‘How to Lie with Statistics’ "A book published 66 years ago and still in print is an essential reference for understanding most of the data that you see about the pandemic afflicting the world today.  Written by Darrell Huff and illustrated by Irving Geis, How to Lie With Statistics is both sardonic and a serious lesson in the abuse of math for propaganda. Whether or not it was studied by our Trump-hating media anxious to make the US look bad, some of its lessons are being employed."  . . .
. . . "But the media keeps screaming about the hard numbers (conveniently no longer interested in “per capita” data) and I’ve yet to see anyone from the administration pushing back nor our elected officials making this point.

"This is not to minimize the number of those who have died from this virus that communist China thrust upon the world. But when speaking about how we have fared, how well Trump has addressed this pandemic, and how well our health care system took care of people, it’s important to be accurate and clear.

"The administration needs to be pushing this information out. Americans need to know the truth, not only about what Trump has done (against so many odds), but also about how miserably Cuomo and de Blasio failed."