Chuck Todd’s accusation that conservative outlets are to blame for the public’s growing lack of trust in the media was still in a steaming pile on the ground when two of America’s biggest papers had to scramble their way to corrections this week.
Both The New York Times and Washington Post had to perform reconstructive surgery on stories critical of the Trump administration. The botched reports indicate a different cause for the public’s lack of trust in the media: a years-long trend of exaggeration, innuendo and flat out false reporting on Trump.
The Washington Post reported in late August that the Trump administration is cracking down on passports at the border, in contradiction to official government statements and other publicly available facts. That story is still unraveling. And last week, The New York Times falsely framed Nikki Haley as responsible for an expensive curtain purchase that was in fact made by the Obama administration. Both outlets overhauled the stories and issued lengthy corrections.
In both cases, journalists shirked reporting standards as basic as reaching out to key players in the story, or putting the facts in their proper context. They exemplify the trend of bad reporting that has come to mark the established outlets waging open war on Trump, and is no doubt fueling distrust in the media — perhaps to a greater extent than the established press would like to admit.
Let’s go through these two reports one by one.
The Washington Post is standing by its August 29 report that the Trump administration is cracking down on potentially fraudulent passports, although it is marked by a stunning number of reporting failures, detailed most thoroughly by The Huffington Post on Monday. Reporters and editors on the story got facts wrong, misled readers, left out key data contradicting the premise of the article, and failed to reach out to the family of a deceased man accused of fraud in the story.
The initial story claimed the Trump administration is taking unprecedented action against thousands of Hispanic people living near the southern border suspected of having obtained false U.S. birth certificates. It was based largely on anecdotal evidence from immigration lawyers working in the area who said they are seeing a surge in the number of passports under scrutiny.
Within hours of its publication, a Slate reporter pointed out the practice of denying passports to people issued birth certificates from midwives suspected of fraud began under the George W. Bush administration, and continued through the Barack Obama administration. The story was corrected Aug. 31 to reflect this error. The story also asserted the Trump administration is newly targeting people delivered by a Texas doctor suspected of fraud, but HuffPo reports that practice also predates this administration.
After the State Department released numbers contradicting the story’s premise a few days after publication, editors added a new claim — that the Trump administration was...
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