The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: mystery-ak on January 19, 2019, 04:10:46 pm
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Yet another Trump 'bombshell' ends up being a hoax
by Washington Examiner
| January 18, 2019 09:35 PM
Another leak about President Trump, supposedly from federal prosecutors, and another media freakout.
This one was different from the earlier ones in its seriousness. Two reporters from BuzzFeed, citing two anonymous law enforcement officials, reported that Trump had instructed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, or at least that this accusation had been passed on to special counsel Robert Mueller.
In a late Friday night news dump 24 hours after this "scoop," Mueller released a statement that the whole thing was a big hoax — "not accurate."
We had drafted an editorial warning people to exercise caution about this big story. Given the media track record under Trump, we didn't need to be fortune tellers to issue this warning. But for so many journalists, whose loathing of Trump has become an obstacle to their professional credibility, this story was just too good to check. People kept believing in it, wanting to believe it, even after the two reporters behind the story gave conflicting accounts of whether they’d seen the documents in question.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/yet-another-trump-bombshell-ends-up-being-a-hoax (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/yet-another-trump-bombshell-ends-up-being-a-hoax)