Bombshell Correction Sums Up the Political Media’s Corruption

L ast week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece detailing a six-minute call — with audio — between then-president Donald Trump and the Georgia secretary of state’s chief investigator, Frances Watson. At the time, Watson was conducting a forensic audit of 2020 mail-in ballots in a few Georgia counties.

This week, the Journal’s reporting precipitated the Washington Post to offer a correction to their initial story that went like so:

Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. 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.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

There is, of course, a crucial difference between a president instructing an investigator to “find the fraud” so she can become “a national hero” and a president telling an investigator he believes she will find fraud if she looks. To contend that Trump was “misquoted” or that the quotes were “misattributed” is to critically understate the dishonesty in the original story. Indeed, it is fair to say that the quotes were fabricated by someone, not misattributed, and then they were published by every major news outlet in the country as a verified fact. Even the Post’s headline for its follow-up — “Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia’s chief elections investigator” — intimates that the tape merely helps in updating the initial reporting rather than completely decimating it.

The single anonymous source used for the story seems to be Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whose office was under pressure from the president at time. Fuchs still claims that the story accurately portrayed the spirit of the conversation that was relayed to him, maybe by Watson. The tape tells a different story.

There is a fundamental truth known by any good journalist: If someone brings you a perfect story or a perfect quote, it is almost surely untrue. Skepticism makes for good journalism. It was up to the Post to vet these claims at the time, rather than push a story forward to help Democrats.

The Trump-Watson story is just one of dozens of big scoops over the past six years that are wholly reliant on anonymous sourcing that has misshaped public perceptions for partisan purposes. It is clear that Trump-era newsroom culture had made journalists susceptible to — or often co-conspirators in — spreading deceptive and politically expedient stories. Throughout the Russia-collusion hysteria, major networks simply passed along every eye-popping scoop that was offered to them by Trump antagonists. Regurgitating rumors is not really journalism, but it did help hasten a long and wasteful independent investigation into the alleged Trump criminal conspiracy. The Bob Mueller investigation did hamper the Trump presidency, as intended, but it also did far more to debunk the work of political journalists than it did to uncover criminality.

CNN, which as my colleague Charles Cooke has noted, no longer functions as a news organization, also misreported the Watson-Trump call. We’re used to it. This is the same network that was forced to retract a story claiming that Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation by Congress for ties to Russia; the same network that should have retracted a piece claiming that James Comey, in his testimony to Congress, was going to refute Trump’s claim that Comey had assured the president that he was not under investigation (instead, Comey backed up Trump’s claim); the same network that liberally disseminated uncorroborated smears of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh; and the same network that falsely reported that Don Jr. had been offered encryption codes to look at hacked DNC emails.

In the last of these blockbusters, Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb accused the president’s son of criminal, perhaps treasonous, behavior, without even authenticating the emails in question. Turns out, their two allegedly completely independent sources had given the reports the same exact erroneous date. A miracle.

CNN, of course, was not alone. Whether we believe Trump is a villain or savior has nothing to do with our expectations of accuracy and professionalism from journalists. The central purpose of the entire enterprise, in fact, is to relay information. It is inconceivable that 20 years ago, a reputable news outlet would have run a story about a presidential phone call — much less a presidential call about undoing an election — using a single antagonistic second-hand unnamed source. Actually, it is inconceivable that they would ever have relied on a single source or an antagonistic source or someone with only second-hand knowledge such a call.

Even during my time as a metro columnist at a decent-sized newspaper, I was asked to offer compelling reasons to rely on anonymous sourcing for any piece. The bigger the target, the more scrutiny was applied by editors. Certainly, none of them, no matter how biased, would ever have allowed a reporter to affect an election with virtually no scrutiny of a source. In contemporary political journalism, it is the norm.

It is in this environment that The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg is free to run a piece using National Enquirer standards of journalism to allege that Trump demeaned dead soldiers — and then see his claims repeated by every media outlet during an election.

As Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams points out, there is another scandal here. NBC News, USA Today, and ABC News, among others, claimed to have independently corroborated the Washington Post’s reporting, some using the fabricated quotes. Which tells us they all came from the same source, or someone related to that source.

The only reason we know any of this, incidentally, is because a recording of the conversation was found in Watson’s trash folder on her device while responding to a public-records request. (Does it not seem peculiar that a state official would throw out an audio recording of the president allegedly berating her to overturn an election? It seems like the kind of audio one saves.) How many stories with this kind of flimsy or dishonest sourcing exist but will never be debunked?

A number of journalists on Twitter noted that reporters make “mistakes,” and that corrections actually indicate accountability. Indeed, any decent journalist has experienced the unpleasantness of crafting a correction. But when dozens of consequential mistakes all skew in the same partisan direction for years, we can no longer consider it happenstance. Moreover, is it really a “mistake” if you don’t follow long-standing protocols of journalism? And is it really “accountability” if a tape surfaces and compels you to acknowledge that you ignored professional standards?

It is also worth recalling that not long ago these major news organizations — and all social-media companies — decided to black out the New York Post’s Hunter Biden email scoop on the risible contention that underlying evidence had not been verified using their journalistic standards. Every part of the Post story, which featured physical evidence and an on-the record first-hand source, still holds up. Journalists were, it is clear, rallying to protect Biden from an unfavorable piece of journalism. This is something they had failed to do when Hillary Clinton was favor-trading and illegally disposing of emails — also a genuine news story.

When Dan Rather was peddling unauthenticated documents about President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War–era service in the National Guard in 2005, amateur bloggers — not reporters — uncovered irrefutable evidence of his “mistake.” It cost the long-time news anchor his career and reputation. If Rather engaged in that kind of behavior today, he would simply be asked to offer an antiseptic correction and move on. There is no real accountability for the erosion of professionalism in mainstream political journalism. J-school professors, in fact, cheer it on. And as long as liberal subscribers value the partisan porn over accuracy, it won’t change.