The Washington Post released a correction on Monday admitting to misquoting then-President Donald Trump's statements to the Georgia Secretary of State during a call about potential election fraud.
This kind of mistake is beyond serious. There's zero accountability in major corporate media anymore, yet they continually insist they're the ones holding the line on the truth. And always remember what should scare you about the media is what *doesn't get exposed." pic.twitter.com/ceBaApCZQ8
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) March 15, 2021
The original story made national headlines after the paper falsely printed that Trump demanded that Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, "find the fraud."
Many interpreted the statement as evidence that Trump was demanding that Republican officials make up cases of fraud in order to tilt the election in his favour, with some, including the Washington Post itself, arguing that it could amount to obstruction, an impeachable offense.
"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 correction reads. "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. He also told her that she had 'the most important job in the country right now.'"
The phone call was "corroborated" by CNN, which also published the remarks. Unlike the Washington Post, CNN has not corrected their stories on the matter.
NBC also claimed to have verified the false claim:
How did NBC NEWS confirm the (NOW "CORRECTED") Washington Post story, exactly, @mitchellreports ? pic.twitter.com/igdzunIXbH
— crabcrawler (@crabcrawler1) March 15, 2021
Conservatives and media critics expressed outrage over the correction, citing it as evidence of what they perceive to be as media bias and lies propagated for the purpose of damaging Trump's reputation.
There is absolutely no way that 20 years ago a newspaper would have gone with story about a presidential call with so little corroboration. This is just one of dozens of major stories that big outlets got completely wrong. And it's no mistake that all of them skew in 1 direction
— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) March 15, 2021
And there will be no accountability for the intentional spreading of disinformation by the @washingtonpost . The liberal cabal was successful in its mission; they can now safely walk everything back.
— Ric (@RendonTex) March 15, 2021
Retracting erroneous information doesn’t address the harm done by sloppy and biased reporting. @washingtonpost failed their readers https://t.co/6N8UO32mTa
— #AKjon..? (@JonRCorbett) March 15, 2021
Now that Trump has exited office, however, such a correction will likely be of little help for the former President.
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