“Correction: 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 Post annotated online at the top of the original story. “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,’ the correction continued. ‘He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now.”
The paper went on to say that its original bogus story was “corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.”
That was an egregious mistake that, frankly, should be actionable legally; the fake report “undoubtedly played a role in the Georgia special elections, which lost the Republicans the Senate. It was also mentioned in the House Democrats’ deceptive impeachment case,” Kyle Becker noted on Monday.
But it gets worse — and really, this goes to the sad state of ‘elite’ journalism in our country today, which is truly in crisis.
The Epoch Times reports that the information fed to the Post was third-hand (and obviously uncorroborated by the Post):
“An official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office was the only source for at least one story that falsely claimed former President Donald Trump told an investigator with the office to “find the fraud.”
Jordan Fuchs, deputy secretary of state, relayed details of the conversation to The Washington Post, an official with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger confirmed to The Epoch Times.
Fuchs was not on the call herself. She was told about the conversation by Frances Watson, the investigator. [Emphasis added]
A recording of the call recently emerged from a records request, showing that the Post and a slew of other outlets had falsely reported Trump uttering several phrases.
The office of Raffensperger, a Republican, says Fuchs did not present details of the conversation as verbatim.”
“The Secretary of State’s Office’s first reports of its investigator’s phone conversation with President Trump relied on the investigator’s recollection. Information about the content of the call was never presented as a word-for-word transcript,” a spokesperson with the office told The Epoch Times via email.
Andrew Schotz with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee told The Epoch Times that some years ago, reporters couldn’t even pursue a story like this without at least two credible, corroborated sources. Of course, back then, reporters wore out shoes chasing down leads.
“There’s so many different sources people can turn to, and you want them to turn to you,” he said, noting that outlets today are more concerned with being first than being accurate. “That kind of feeds upon itself, and the competition maybe lowers your standards at the same time.”
Perhaps. But also, this is true: Leftist ‘mainstream’ outlets like the Post, along with the NY Times, CNN, etc., weren’t concerned about being first in the Trump era, they were more interested in trashing him and his administration day in, and day out, and as such they were used as patsies time and again by corrupt deep state intel sources whose agenda was to get rid of Trump any way possible.
They allowed their credibility to be destroyed in the process because they, too, agreed with the ‘get Trump’ agenda.