Fact-check failures.
More than two years after Donald Trump won the presidential election, many big news outlets still haven’t learned a basic lesson. Trump lies. All the time.
The latest example is Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud in Florida. CNN, ABC News, and CBS spread the president’s meritless assertions about purported fraud.
The goal of journalism, in part at least, is to inform the public. Combine that proposition with Trump’s tendencies, and it follows that media outlets shouldn’t spread the president’s claims without fact-checking them.
On Monday morning, Trump posted an evidence-free tweet alleging that “many ballots are missing or forged” in Florida, adding that “an honest vote count is no longer possible.” Trump’s demand for a sudden end to the recount is transparently political — he made it as the election night leads enjoyed by his preferred Republican candidates in the gubernatorial and Senate races — Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott, respectively — dwindled.
Even Scott’s own election monitors acknowledge they’ve seen no evidence of wrongdoing. But ABC elevated Trump’s evidence-free allegation in a tweet.
About 40 minutes later, ABC posted a second tweet noting that Trump “made claims of fraud without providing any evidence.” But the initial tweet without the fact-check has been retweeted more than 200 times as of early Monday afternoon.
NBC made a similar decision. Its headline about Trump’s tweet quoted his baseless claim about how “many ballots are missing or forged,” without noting that there’s no evidence for it.
While NBC’s story does note in the second paragraph that the president is making fraud allegations “without offering any evidence,” that won’t help readers who don’t make it past the headline.
CNN’s framing of its story about Trump’s tweet war arguably worse, with baseless claims of fraud presented as one side of the story and objections to those unfounded claims presented as the other.
As Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star noted, headlines that failed to fact-check Trump were more the norm than the exception.
Some journalists have argued that what the president says is news, full stop. But it is possible to add the key context. The Guardian, for example, fact-checked Trump in its headline about his tweet, noting that his allegations about fraud are “baseless.”
In the pre-Trump era, presidents were counted on to mostly tell the truth. That’s no longer the case under President Trump. It’s past time for major outlets to adjust accordingly.
