Reporting Error Leads to FAKE NEWS Claiming Trump Part of “Pay to Play” Scheme
A basic “reporting error” by two media heavyweights, NPR and Reuters led to a FAKE NEWS fury, which included a push to suggest President Trump was dabbling in “pay to play” politics.
The entire story and narrative were fake and happened simply because NPR and Reuters couldn’t manage to get their dates correct.
Our media is so anxious to smear Trump, they’re not even fact-checking simple items like DATES.
From Daily Caller
Basic reporting errors by Reuters and NPR resulted in journalists falsely reporting that President Trump attended a foreign diplomat’s party at Trump’s D.C. hotel in what was portrayed as a possible pay-to-play scenario.
NPR and Reuters both reported that Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S., Salem al-Sabah, was throwing a gala in honor of his country’s independence day at the Trump International Hotel. Reuters definitively placed the event as happening on Saturday, while NPR’s coverage implied the same.
According to Reuters, the event was expected to cost between $40,000 and $60,000. When Trump was spotted at the hotel on Saturday, a number of prominent journalists on Twitter spread the allegation that Trump was appearing at al-Sabah’s party after the ambassador gave Trump tens of thousands of dollars in business.
There’s just one problem — the party took place on Wednesday, not Saturday, hotel staff confirmed to The Daily Caller. But by the time the facts came to light, the media had already widely circulated the false story.
An editor at left-wing website Think Progress, Judd Legum, led the charge in cranking up the rhetoric surrounding Trump’s apparent cameo at his hotel during al-Sabah’s party. “The message is clear to foreign governments,” Legum declared. “Hold your lavish events at my hotel and I might stop by.” Other journalists spread Legum’s claims across Twitter, furthering the false narrative. (Legum has since deleted the tweets, although not before other Twitter users captured screenshots.)
Independent journalism nonprofit ProPublica, which is funded by left-wing financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, relied on Legum’s tweets and uncritically spread the false narrative, implying that Trump’s appearance at his hotel Saturday night was related to the money received for the Kuwaiti party. Sopan Deb, a reporter at The New York Times, retweeted ProPublica’s false tweet to his followers.
The Washington Post’s White House bureau chief, Phillip Rucker, also spread the false allegations, although he later deleted it and admitted the party took place on Wednesday.
By press time, neither Reuters nor NPR had corrected their stories to indicate that the Kuwaiti event took place on Wednesday.
Amy Moreno is a Published Author, Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can reach her on Facebook here.
