It was actually a pretty minor quibble, albeit one that had large ramifications. Flynn did discuss with the Russians, and the claim that it was before the election was incorrect, as far as we know.
In any other news story, that sort of fixing of a statement would be a clarification, but only because that piece of information had as large of ramifications as it did did it require more than a simple clarification.
That wording makes it kinda sound like they have trouble getting it right, and they are trying and trying and yet failing, but are really wanting to try again and get it right this time, gosh darn it!
When the reality is that they get it right hundreds of times a day, every day, and it was just this instance where they got it wrong. Yes, they want to avoid a repeat of that mistake, but it is by enforcing the guidelines and policies they already have, not by trying “to get it right the next time.”
My impression, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, was that Brian Ross was legitimately covering a breaking story, and got one detail wrong: the date when something happened, whether it was before the election or after it. Now normally this would be a very minor point, but in this case, that difference would have serious implications. Again, a breaking story, and he’s the one in front of the camera, and he misinterpreted a timeframe. He apologized, the network suspended him.
You’re making it sound like Ross elbowed his way in front of the camera to breathlessly announce this one tidbit that was in error. That’s not what happened.
And why the “Matt Lauer-style” comment? Lauer was another talking head, one given the fluffier material than I think Ross handled (I assume - I didn’t know who Brian Ross was before this happened, but any TV news I get is pretty much only in the mornings when Lauer was on). Lauer didn’t get to run with his own stories either, he was the talking head who read stories and interviewed the actual newsmakers.
They’d more likely get fired for printing an inconvenient story correctly.
This is a great example of the favorite right wing tactic of false equivalency. It started, I think, with the Bush typewriter. If there are reams of evidence against your guy, you sneak in a phony, expose it, and say all the evidence is tainted.
That’s what they were trying to do with the false WaPo plant about Moore.
Along the same lines, what Franken did, wrong as it was, is exactly the same as Roy Moore trying to rape children.
And one bad ABC news story, swiftly corrected and apologized for, is exactly the same as decades of Fox News crap.
Even if Brian Ross’ original report had been accurate, I doubt it would it have made a hill-of-a-beans difference to his base, bet they wouldn’t have even flinched.
I think you’ve got the facts correct, at least AFAIK.
It was from a headline I remember seeing a little while ago, that “Matt Lauer ruled the roost” or something along those lines. I can’t remember where I saw it. In that case, I believe it was an explanation of how his misdeeds were allowed to continue for so long: he was the big shot and no one dared challenge him. I didn’t know if Brian Ross held a similar level of prestige at ABC, and if that might be an explanation about why he was allowed to run with a story when apparently “We hadn’t approved doing that.” It sounds like there was some sort of an approval process which was ignored in this case.
“Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true—except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”
—Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy (Erwin Knoll, editor, “The Progressive”)
I don’t understand the criticism. The last data point doesn’t show a decrease, which is the only thing I noticed. I’m assuming there’s some larger problem than one dot in the wrong place?
Look at the low dip labeled 8.8%. It’s lower than the point to the right labeled 8.6%.
Also, here are the true numbers
9.1 9.0 9.0 9.1 9.0 9.1 9.0 9.0 9.0 8.8 8.6 8.5
The whole graph is falsified.
When the actual news story cam out, I thought it wasn’t about Trump, but about “a senior person in the Trump campaign [or administration]” asking Flynn to contact the Russians. No?
Not that this changes the fact that it wasn’t “fake news”, but I’m just going by what I remember as the news item.
It’s this sort of semantic gamesmanship which make many of us think right-wingers are insincere. @ Hurricane —
(1) How many ABC employees would you guess were aware they were publishing false information?
(2) Do you think ABC executives encouraged their reporters to publish lies? Or to fail to double-check their stories?
(3) What was ABC’s response when they learned of the error?
(4) Can you elaborate on what you think Goldston meant by “pilloried … for reporting fake news”? As a matter of logic, do you think that statement, by itself, even constitutes an admission, let alone an admission that the lie was deliberate?
Fox News, the Trump White House have also been accused of publishing “fake news.”
(5) Are those accusations valid?
(6) How would you compare the response of ABC to its error with the responses by FoxNews or the Trump White House to their Fake News?
Thanks in advance for answering these questions sincerely.
(1) I would guess that a rather small number of employees were involved in the publishing if the information at all. Of those, most of them (and possibly all of them) were probably unaware that it was false.
(2) It’s pretty clear that the chief executive was appalled by the decision.
(3) Slow, but they eventually got it right. First they called it a mere “clarification”. Goldston said “The thing that compounded our mistake is that not only did we make a mistake, if we had then corrected ourselves right away, again – we wouldn’t be in this position. … And then it took us seven hours, eight hours to get our story straight. This is not acceptable. It’s not acceptable. And we will all pay the price for a long time.”
(4) I’ve already elaborated on it several times. I think he was trying to impress the gravity of the error on his staff. I don’t think the statement, by itself, serves as either an admission or a denial. It was meant for internal consumption (what was it HRC called it? a “private position”?), not a public position.
(5) Which accusations? Without some specific incident (like we’re discussing in this thread), it’s a bit hard to pass judgement. I’m confident in saying that neither the Trump White House nor Fox News have a blemish-free record.
(6) See my response to #5. Without you naming some particular incident it’s hard to compare a response to this one specific incident at ABC News (which was mediocre) with vague generalities about the White House.
Given your answers to questions #1-4 I must say some of your other posts in the thread (or indeed thread title itself) strike me as astonishingly incongruous. In particular, the post by you that I just quoted seems bizarre given your sensible answers to #1-4. If I were in an uncharitable mood I might guess you are happy to score “rhetorical points” with zero substance, but then back-pedal to a more reasonable position when called on it.
It’s good to see, by your answer to #5, that you seem to agree the Fake Facts from Trump and FoxNews are so numerous as to require pruning before discussion. Perhaps you could demonstrate familiarity with True Facts by giving some of your own examples of the most egregious Trump-Fox fakery.
I could do that, but I’m going to make one request first: if you want to have a lengthy discussion about Trump / Fox, could you start another thread to do it in? I don’t want to see this thread derailed with that discussion.
While that’s true at the time of your post, check out MSNBC right now.
The top story is “Growing list of Dem. Senators call on Franken to step Down.” They’re hardly sweeping this under the rug. There just was no news yesterday regarding this issue.
(Though I expect Trump to grab the top spot soon after this Jerusalem announcement.)
However, unemployment numbers are routinely updated, so it seems plausible that the chart is an act of incompetence rather than malevolence. Putting the dots in the wrong places seems like something that Tim the Intern fucked up, as opposed to part of a master plan to get Obama out of office.
And frankly with Fox News, sometimes it can be difficult to tell incompetence and malevolence apart.
Look at the chart and compare the number sequence to what I posted. The true numbers run even at 9.0-9.1 and then dip to 8.8, 8.6, 8.5 at the end.
(post shortened)
Taking the OP’s entire quoted piece into account -
(1) - I see two. That would be the ABC News President, and some guy named Ross.
(4) - Goldston’s statement, “250,000 tweets. One percent positive, 99 percent negative about this news division”, certainly sounds like he felt pilloried … for reporting fake news, to me.
Why would anyone chose to take Goldston’s statement out of context when considering Goldston’s statement that Ross reported information that was “just plain wrong,” and did so without anyone “having ever made a decision that we were going to go to air with that information”? “Information that was just plain wrong” certain qualifies as fake news.
*Quote:
[ABC News president James] Goldston noted that ABC News “spent this weekend getting absolutely pilloried as a news division for reporting fake news.”
“250,000 tweets. One percent positive, 99 percent negative about this news division. Two tweets from the president,” he told staff.
Goldston also said, “If it isn’t obvious to everyone in this news division, we have taken a huge hit and we have made the job of every single person in this news division harder as a result. It’s much, much harder. We have people in Washington who are going to bear the brunt of this today and in the days forward. Very, very, very, very unfortunate. Really, really angry about it.”
The ABC News chief said that Ross reported information that was “just plain wrong,” and did so without anyone “having ever made a decision that we were going to go to air with that information.”
…
“The thing that compounded our mistake is that not only did we make a mistake, if we had then corrected ourselves right away, again – we wouldn’t be in this position. It would have been a very different story,” he said. “But we ended up in the impossible situation where we had actually conflicting information that we said on air, which conflicted with the information that was online. And then it took us seven hours, eight hours to get our story straight. This is not acceptable. It’s not acceptable. And we will all pay the price for a long time.”*
No, at the time it was aired, it was assumed(which was the real problem) to be accurate.
Fake news is known to be wrong at the time of creation. Or airing something known to be fake.
I’m saying that it is possible – not even likely and very far from certain – just possible that the chart was based on the unemployment numbers as they are announced each month, and then what you linked to is the numbers that were revised as new information came in.
To say it another way, if I look at BLS today for the unemployment rate for December 1999, the number on its website would probably not be exactly the same number as reported in January 2000 for the month of December 1999. It’s very common for unemployment numbers to be adjusted later as new information comes in.