The Washington Post made a massive correction on Monday to a January story about a phone call between then President Donald Trump and Georgia election investigator Frances Watson, admitting that he mistakenly attributed several quotes to Trump based on an anonymous source.
The Post initially reported that Trump told an official who worked in the office of Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to “find fraud” in the state, that he narrowly lost to Joe Biden, and that she would be a “national hero. “if you did.
However, a recent recording of the December 23 call found that he did not use those words. Instead, Trump said he would be “praised” when the “right answer came out” and encouraged her to take a closer look at the postal ballots in Fulton County, the state’s heavily blue and most populous county.
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The Post published a lengthy correction to its story: “Correction: Two months after the publication of this story, Georgia’s Secretary of State released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s call in December with the state’s top election investigator. The recording revealed that the Post erroneously cited Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source.Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or said that he would be “a national hero” if he did. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, stating that she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country at the moment.” be found here. The title and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes that were misleading to Trump. “
CNN also reported on the call citing an unidentified source and waited until Monday afternoon to correct its story, after initially declaring that Trump said “national hero” and “find fraud” in its opening paragraph. Many media outlets took up the story, including Vox, ABC News and NBC News.
Although the media often cites sources that paraphrase conversations in which they participated or heard, the use of quotations indicates to the reader that the subject said those exact words.
“Our media is so, so, so incredibly corrupt,” tweeted Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway. “They * always * mischaracterized this connection – in a corrupt and fraudulent way. But, to really quote in service of that?
After MSNBC’s Hayes Brown defended the Post and praised its correction, Hemingway replied that it was unlikely to be a “self-policing victory.”
“So they made up quotes. What’s in the real F,” tweeted CNN conservative commentator Mary Katharine Ham.
Conservative writer Mark Hemingway said the Post’s correction and new headline did not adequately reflect his error, calling the error “beyond gravity” and indicative of a lack of responsibility in the corporate media.
In his conversation with Watson, Trump continued to claim that he won Georgia by “hundreds of thousands of votes” and “something bad happened” there. Watson told Trump that his team and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were focused on finding the truth and investigating any allegations of fraud or wrongdoing.
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Trump was the first Republican to lose the state in a presidential election since 1992. He repeatedly attacked Raffensperger and Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, R., after losing the race there, accusing them of being corrupt. Several audits and investigations have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the state, and recounts have confirmed the result.
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In another leaked call, he also told Raffensperger that he won Georgia by “hundreds of thousands and votes” and encouraged officials to “find” enough votes to make up for his margin of defeat. Some Republicans blamed Trump’s rhetoric against the integrity of the election as a contribution to the ex-Georgia Sens’s runoff defeats in January’s second round. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.