Fake News About Donald Trump: A Compliation

Donald Trump says outrageous things, and attacks the media. That might seem to be a hugely dysfunctional presidential style. But in fact he has driven the media bonkers, causing them to publish a flurry of badly sourced and easily debunked stories about Trump, thus validating his attacks. If Trump were intentionally trying to trap them, this would be a brilliant strategy. He’s not, or course. He’s just being Donald Trump.

First, from The Federalist:

13 More Major Fake News Stories In Just Five Months Of Trump’s Presidency

You can read all the details here, but this is the list.

• January 22: The Trump-Comey Bromance
• February 1: Neil Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever’ Club
• February 17: The Mobilization of the National Guard
• February 25: Kuwait’s Pay-to-Play at Trump Hotel
• April 11: The Jeff Sessions ‘Filth’ Scandal
• May 1: Ghosts of Billboards Past
• May 3: The DOJ Prosecutes a Woman for Laughing
• May 4: The Nonexistent Beer Party
• May 4: ‘Rape Is a Preexisting Condition’
• May 4: The Football Analogy Fiasco
• May 10: The Fake Rosenstein Resignation Scandal
• May 10: Comey’s Russian Probe Resource Request
• May 20: The ‘Ivanka Charity’ Insanity

This article in The Federalist is a follow-up to an earlier one titled “16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won.” That’s right: getting called out on a whole bunch of earlier bogus stories has not seemed to engender any journalistic integrity in the media.

Yet More Fake News

One might think that the above list of thirteen bogus stories (added to the earlier sixteen reported by The Federalist) would pretty much exhaust the universe of such blunders by major “mainstream” outlets. Alas, this is what fighter pilots call a “target rich environment,” and the Daily Caller had no trouble coming up with “7 Times CNN Botched The News In 2017.” That’s right: just CNN.

• Comey Testimony
• CNN Smears Scaramucci
• CNN Spreads Fake News…About Fake News!
• Republican Donor Did (Not) Fund The Dossier
• Fake (Fish) News
• Trump Is (Not) Ignorant Of Japanese Cars
• CNN Botches Another ‘Bombshell’

The “bombshell” was from this last Friday.

Perhaps the most jarring error in the CNN report is the date on which members of the Trump Organization, including Donald Trump and Trump Jr., were sent the email. The network reported that a person named Mike Erickson sent the email on Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to Wikileaks documents as well as a decryption key to access them.

Yes! Collusion!

Except that the actual date on the e-mail was September 14, after WikiLeaks had publicly announced the availability of the documents, and published the decryption key. In short, somebody simply e-mailed Trump, Jr. with publicly available information. Some scandal.

CNN still has the story online, with a weaselly “correction.”

CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 — 10 days earlier — based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.

No, not “less significant.” Utterly meaningless.

Three in One Week

Yes, Axios reports three media screw-ups in one week, only one of which duplicates something above:

• Flynn’s testimony: Last Friday, ABC News reported that former national security advisor Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that President Trump, while still a candidate, directed him to contact Russian officials. But later in the day, the network issued a “clarification” that the direction came when Trump was president-elect. That changed the impact of the story entirely as it’s a common occurrence for presidential transition teams to reach out to foreign governments.
• Deutsche Bank subpoena: Reuters and Bloomberg both reported on Tuesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for information on accounts relating to President Trump and his family members — seemingly confirming that Mueller had expanded his probe to investigate the president’s financial dealings. The WSJ defused that bombshell in a follow-up report stating that the subpoenas actually dealt with “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”
• WikiLeaks emails: CNN reported this morning that senior Trump campaign officials, including Trump himself, received an email from an unknown sender on September 4, 2016 that linked them to what could have been unreleased WikiLeaks documents. WaPo issued their own report later in the afternoon that the email was actually sent on September 14 — and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier.

Conclusion

As Peggy Noonan has noted “Trump Has Been Lucky in His Enemies.” The subhead reads: “Cursing pols, screeching students and intolerant abortion advocates have become the face of the left.” Mainstream media types may be a bit less strident (on average), but they have also made themselves into enemies Trump is lucky to have.