This morning, CNN published an article alleging an effort was made to connect Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with documents hacked from the Democratic National Committee nine days prior to their publication. CNN reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb used as evidence of this implicit collusion an email sent on September 4 containing a decryption key and web address for the documents, which were hosted by WikiLeaks.
As it turns out, however, that email was actually sent on September 14, the day following the documents’ publication, rendering the “exclusive scoop” by CNN a non-story. Furthermore, it seems that the email’s author, Michael J. Erickson, doesn’t work with WikiLeaks at all. According to a follow-up piece in the Washington Post, Erickson described himself to the campaign as the president of an aviation management company. Alan S. Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr., told the Post that Erickson was unknown to the campaign and his email just one of “a ton of unsolicited emails like this on a variety of topics.”
Just last week, ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed a similar error when he incorrectly reported that Trump directed former national security adviser Michael Flynn to contact the Russians during Trump’s candidacy; actually, Trump’s direction came while he was president-elect. While Ross was suspended from ABC News for four weeks without pay and pulled from all Trump-related coverage, his — and the CNN reporters’ – mistake has lasting effects on public perception of the Trump collusion investigation (not to mention the economy; Ross’s report caused the Dow to fall by 350 points). By rushing articles to print without fact-checking, these reporters are exacerbating a lack of trust in journalists, undermining special counsel Robert Mueller’s very real investigation, and fueling unequivocal dismissals of Trump wrongdoing as “fake news.”
As of publication, CNN has not updated the story.