#JOURNALISM: Fake News, Fake Boos, as bogus report that Trump crowd booed John Glenn has to be taken down.
While I was away over the weekend, the AP issued a retraction on their story about the Wisconsin Republicans booing George W. Bush’s well-wishes for Bill Clinton. It’s about time.
Still, the official retraction comes a bit late, and on the heels of a troubling attempt to whitewash the record. Also, with no explanation as to how the error was made, or which reporter made the mistake (remember, there were five reporters listed on the story), AP leaves itself open to charges of political bias so deep that it affects reporting and management decisions. I’d like to think better of America’s preeminent wire service–so why won’t they just come out and give a 500 word narrative of what happened?
Or, if the AP isn’t going to fess up by themselves, why are all the big media reporters silent?
More on that here. Maybe they’re not actually getting worse. Maybe they were always that bad, and they’re just getting caught more often.
UPDATE: “Fake News” and the Boston Globe’s fictionalized Trump-dystopia front page. “Is that ground-zero of the ‘fake news’ subject? Maybe all the later effort to point to pro-Trump things as fake was generated to cover up the embarrassing Boston Globe screwup.”