Remembering the Worst Media Misses of 2022

Welcome to a special year-end edition of “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, as 2022 comes to an end, we recap the year’s biggest media misses.

Media Ignore Kavanaugh Assassination Plot

In June, much of the media attempted to sweep a foiled assassination attempt against a sitting Supreme Court justice under the rug after a California man traveled to the Maryland home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh with the intent to murder the conservative justice.

Police detained 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske, wearing black clothes, in front of Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland, according to a criminal complaint. The man told authorities he called 911 because he was having suicidal thoughts. He told a dispatcher he had come “from California to kill a specific” Supreme Court justice, the affidavit said. Authorities found a Glock 17 handgun with two magazines and ammunition, a tactical knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a screwdriver, and other gear in Roske’s backpack.

Yet just days later, the only Sunday talk show to mention the foiled assassination plot was Fox News Sunday, according to TVEyes. ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union all failed to cover the murder plot at all.

On the day of the attack, the story was seemingly absent from the online homepages of ABC News and the New York Times, and the Times later buried the news on page A20 of the next day’s paper.

USA Today did not include a single story on the assassination attempt in its print edition on Thursday, and Politico Playbook also failed to mention the news.

Off-the-Mark Olympics Coverage

“Pay no attention to the human-rights violations behind the curtain” seemed to be the NBC approach to covering the Beijing Olympics at the start of the year. 

While the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said at the time that the Olympics in Beijing would not be “business as usual” because “we know that a genocide has been committed there,” much of the mainstream media seemed to have missed the memo, instead choosing to give undue credibility to China’s denials of its human-rights abuses.

NBC broadcasters took a both-sides approach to reporting on Chinese human-rights abuses, casting the Uyghur genocide and other atrocities as the subject of “allegations” leveled by the U.S. rather than as well-established facts.

Savannah Guthrie reported at the time that the U.S. had undertaken a diplomatic boycott of the Games because of human rights, “in particular China’s treatment of the minority Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region,” which she said the U.S. “has come right out” and labeled a “genocide.”

Sports pundit J. A. Adande took the cake during an appearance on ESPN, however, when he claimed it was hypocritical for Americans to focus on China’s human-rights abuses during the Olympics in light of Republican “assaults on voting rights” and racial injustices in the U.S.

Media Miss the Point in Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, a number of U.S. reporters jumped into action and offered excellent coverage of the unfolding conflict. However, some outlets and pundits unleashed embarrassing hot takes in the early days of the war.

The View co-host Joy Behar was widely panned for whining about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine had thwarted her vacation plans. “I’m scared of what’s going to happen in Western Europe too,” Behar said during a discussion on the show about what the invasion means for the rest of the world. “You know, you just plan a trip. You want to go there, want to go to Italy for four years, and I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic, and now this.”

Embracing Democratic talking points, CBS News used the bloody conflict as a chance to explain away rising gas prices, inflation, and supply-chain issues that had already plagued Americans for months: “The U.S. economy has been hit with increased gas prices, inflation, and supply-chain issues due to the Ukraine crisis,” CBS wrote in a tweet sharing an article that explored potential fallout from the invasion.

‘Don’t Say Gay’

In one of the strongest displays of DeSantis Derangement Syndrome, the mainstream media went hook, line, and sinker for the “don’t say gay” attacks on the Florida Parental Rights in Education law.

On Saturday Night Live, “Weekend Update” host Colin Jost explained that “the law actually means that you can’t acknowledge that gay exists at all.” A number of outlets seemed to take the satirical newsman’s description at face value.

Several ESPN broadcasters participated in an on-air moment of silence to protest the bill, which, despite the media brouhaha, only prohibits classroom instruction relating to sexual orientation or gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grade.

ESPN’s Elle Duncan spoke out in March against the Florida bill and similar proposals in other states, claiming they are “targeting our LGBTQIA+ communities.”

Staffers at ESPN and Disney, ESPN’s parent company, held walkouts to protest the bill.

Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek called DeSantis at the time to “express our disappointment and concern that if the legislation becomes law, it could be used to unfairly target gay, lesbian, non-binary, and transgender kids and families,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. 

‘Republicans Pounce’

When gas prices hit record highs in the spring, Americans, already hit by rising costs in other areas, were understandably upset. But a number of Democrats and the mainstream media dismissed these concerns and leaned into the old “Republicans pounce” trope.

The New York Times published a “fact-check”: “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices.” The fact-check claimed “top Republican lawmakers took to the airwaves and the floors of Congress with misleading claims that pinned the blame on President Biden and his energy policies.”

While Republican lawmakers supported the ban, they asserted that the pain at the pump long preceded the war in Ukraine. Gas-price hikes, they said, were the result of Mr. Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, the temporary halt on new drilling leases on public lands and the surrendering of ‘energy independence’ — all incorrect assertions.

Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote, “Biden heeded Republicans’ pleas to ban Russian oil. Then they pounced.”

In fact, on his first day in office, Biden’s Department of the Interior issued a memo suspending the authority of local Bureau of Land Management offices to approve leases, drilling permits, and mining-operation plans that would support America’s oil supply. His administration also canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline. Both acts sent an unmistakably chilling message to the oil and gas industry: don’t invest in growth while I’m in office.

During remarks at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference, Biden cited the New York Times fact check and Washington Post op-ed as evidence that it is Putin who is to blame for rising gas prices, not his own energy policies.

No Shortage of Post-Roe Fearmongering

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June predictably led to a number of absurd comments from the pro-abortion crowd. The bad takes had already begun one month earlier, when Politico first published a majority draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that suggested the Court was poised to overturn Roe.

Democrats and the mainstream media warned that the overturn of Roe could bring about any number of issues, from the downfall of interracial marriage to an opportunity to criticize a lack of inclusion for transgender people in discussions of pregnancy and abortion. One transgender activist went so far as to tell the Washington Post that the overturn of Roe could “kill trans people.”

Feminist attorney Jill Filipovic suggested those in the pro-life crowd should think about the impact overturning Roe would have on men, who she oddly claimed “wouldn’t have their kids” without abortion. CNN, meanwhile, warned viewers to be on guard for “far-right” violence against abortionists, despite pro-abortion protesters setting fire to a pro-life organization’s headquarters and vandalizing a church. 

Reporters Do PR for Biden’s Student-Loan ‘Forgiveness’

In August, the media went to bat for President Biden after he ordered the “cancellation” of up to $10,000 in student-loan debt for Americans making less than $125,000 a year. 

The White House took a misleading approach to combating real criticism of the plan, choosing to take to Twitter to “clap back” at critics who had received loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which aimed to save businesses that were forced to shut down during the pandemic.

While Biden’s loan “forgiveness” at the expense of American taxpayers was enacted via executive action, the PPP program was enacted through congressional legislation and aimed to avoid an unemployment crisis after strict Covid-19 mitigation rules shuttered businesses for months. PPP loan recipients were offered forgiveness if they could prove the loans had been used for business expenses.

Nonetheless, the mainstream media gushed over the White House’s petty display. Vanity Fair wrote, “White House Twitter Account Tells Republican Hypocrites to Sit Down and STFU”; the New York Times wrote that the White House “snaps back at Twitter critics”; while Forbes added that the “White House Topped Twitter by Trolling GOP on Loan Forgiveness.” Axios said the White House “claps back at MTG and other GOP lawmakers calling student loan plans unfair.”

Politico Outs a Sexual-Assault Survivor

Politico shockingly contributed to the re-traumatization of a sexual-assault survivor this year, with seemingly no remorse.

Reporter Adam Wren, amid Jennifer-Ruth Green’s run for Congress in Indiana’s first district, outed her as a victim of sexual assault.

Green, a Republican, is an African-American Air Force veteran and National Guardswoman who served in Iraq. Wren wrote of Green’s “mostly stellar” military career but noted documents revealed she was reprimanded twice in 2009, including for “wandering away” during a visit to the national training center in Iraq. While she was at that training center, an Iraqi soldier groped her and exposed himself. 

“The reality of it is — like I said at one point in my life to my assailant, ‘No. Please stop. Don’t.’ — and he did what he wanted to do . . . This is the exact same situation all over again, all because there was a man who wanted some sort of gratification,” she said.

“Adam Wren spent time in this article focusing on every single detail down to the skirt I was wearing, down to the color of the skirt I was wearing, down to every single knob I touched, all of those things, but yet he writes clinically about one of the worst days of my life,” Green said, adding that Wren wanted to “reduce it to 50 characters.”

Biden’s Tall Tales

Lastly, President Biden has, of course, earned his own dishonorable mention, having told a number of odd untruths this year, including that he had spoken with the man who “invented” insulin despite the doctor having died before Biden was born. On the same day that Biden made his puzzling comment about insulin, he also falsely said that his son Beau died while serving in Iraq.

“They talk about inflation . . . inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil and what Russia’s doing . . . excuse me, the war in Ukraine,” the president said. “I’m thinking about Iraq because that’s where my son died.”

Biden had also said that his son Beau lived for only 19 months after he came home from Iraq. Previously, during an event in Colorado on October 12, he said: “I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the Conspicuous Service Medal, and lost his life in Iraq. Imagine the courage, the daring, and the genuine sacrifice — genuine sacrifice they all made.”

Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, almost six years after he left Iraq. President Biden has previously suggested that Beau’s exposure to burn pits during his time in Iraq is connected with his brain cancer. 

The same week as the comment about his son, Biden claimed in a speech that the U.S. has the “lowest inflation rate of almost any country in the world.” In fact, 15 other developed countries currently have lower inflation rates than the U.S. has.

This month, Biden claimed he awarded a Purple Heart to his uncle Frank who served in World War II. The president said his uncle was eligible for a Purple Heart, which is awarded to service members who were wounded or killed in action, but never received it. He said his father encouraged him to give his uncle a Purple Heart during Biden’s time as vice president. However, he did not become vice president until 2009, ten years after his uncle died and seven years after his father died. 

FactCheck.org was unable to find evidence that Frank Biden ever received a Purple Heart. Biden also falsely claimed that his uncle enlisted in the Army one day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but he actually joined months before the attack, according to Snopes. 

This from a president who sought to launch a “Disinformation Governance Board.”