This diary has been high on the Rec list since Saturday morning:
Orange guy draws hundreds to his cult rally in Pensacola
The only problem is that it’s not true. It wasn’t the diarist’s fault. The diary was based on an AP report that was posted to a Sinclair-owned television station, WEAR.
Trump did not “draw hundreds.” While the arena was not “packed to the rafters” as Trump claimed, the photo circulating on social media was from earlier in the evening, long before Trump appeared and most of the audience members were in their seats.
Dave Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Post, tweeted (on his personal Twitter account, not his work Twitter account) photos showing a nearly empty arena based on these erroneous reports and images that were making the rounds on social media. Now, Weigel is being bashed by Trump and his followers for the mistake. Weigel has been forced to apologize:
Weigel said he took the tweet down after Daily Mail political editor David Martosko told him he had gotten it wrong.
"Sure thing: I apologize. I deleted the photo after @dmartosko told me I'd gotten it wrong. Was confused by the image of you walking in the bottom right corner," he tweeted.
Weigel is a veteran reporter. He should know better. I don’t fault the diarist here necessarily. The story came from a television station run by right wing Sinclair Broadcasting, via AP.
Still, the story didn’t ring true for me. I watched a bit of the rally last night and the crowd seemed rather large. It took me about three seconds on Google to find numerous reports that contradicted the “hundreds” claim, as I and several others pointed out in the comments section of the diary. Yet people went right on reccing it, and the diarist never updated the piece to highlight the error.
This false report comes one day after CNN was forced to correct its story about an email sent to Trump, Jr., as The New York Times details:
CNN on Friday corrected an erroneous report that Donald Trump Jr. had received advance notice from the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks about a trove of hacked documents that it planned to release during last year’s presidential campaign.
In fact, the email to Mr. Trump was sent a day after the documents, stolen from the Democratic National Committee, were made available to the general public. The correction undercut the main thrust of CNN’s story, which had been seized on by critics of President Trump as evidence of coordination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.
It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”
…
CNN’s erroneous scoop, about the email to Donald Trump Jr., rocketed around cable news and social media on Friday morning. But it fell apart after The Washington Post reported that the email — which included a decryption key to access hacked documents — was dated Sept. 14, not Sept. 4, as CNN initially reported. WikiLeaks publicized links to the documents in question on Sept. 13.
And only last week, the often erratic and untrustworthy Brian Ross of ABC News blew a story on Flynn Flippin’ Friday:
Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.
I know we aren’t going to hold diarists here to journalistic standards. But if credible information arises in the comments section of a diary that contradicts the gist of the story, the author should update the diary at the very least, or take it down completely if the piece is wholly incorrect.
CNN, the major newspapers, ABC News and any other serious news outlets must be on their journalistic A-game in the current environment, lest they (and we) feed Trump’s bogus “fake news” narrative.
Granted, there is something highly ironic about being called out for “fake” anything by a man who, if his lips are moving, is lying. All the more reason not make these sloppy mistakes.
If a story seems too good to be true, check it before you post it. It’s the least we can do.