Honesty matters
The Washington Post rightly issued a correction for a mistake they made, but it exposes other media outlets' abdication of their responsibility to independently verify facts and sources.
On Monday, March 15th, the Washington Post issued a correction to one of its stories from January. It wasn’t just any story, it was one that had caused quite a bit of fervor when it came out. Like many of the news media’s articles back then, this one was about Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election, something he claimed was possible due to the “major fraud” that had occurred on the night of November 3rd.
The Post’s story was about how then-President Trump had spoken to Frances Watson, Georgia’s top elections investigator, on the phone and asked her to “find the fraud”, alleging that if she were to find said fraud she’d be “a national hero”. This sort of thinly-veiled request matched what we had heard from Trump on his call with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2nd, so believing Trump would pressure someone else wasn’t too far out of the question. The problem here is that it didn’t happen.
The call happened, but the words quoted above which were attributed to Trump were not said. This we know now because The Wall Street Journal published a recording of that call last week. So where did The Post get its false information from? It turns out that they heard this from an anonymous source who was close to Watson, who we now know was Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs (who has been identified with her consent). Fuchs says that The Post’s story “accurately reflected the investigator’s interpretation of the call”, but the quotes were wrong.
The problem here wasn’t the use of an anonymous source, anonymous sources have a clear and important place in journalism, and sometimes the person close to the truth isn’t in a position to reveal it without massive personal consequences. The problem is that The Post just went with it, and what’s even worse is that they weren’t the only ones to do it. CNN, ABC and The New York Times were just a few of the media outlets that took The Post’s mistaken quotes and reused them, without verifying the source on their own.
This damages their credibility in spectacular fashion, and credibility is something a lot of them have been lacking recently.
It’s not that they shouldn’t have issued corrections, of course they should have, and they did the right thing in that respect. What’s troublesome is that this level of piggybacking off of one single source that none of them decided to confirm on their own, in an attempt to get out a quick article, makes one wonder what else they’ve not bothered to confirm before reporting as true.
The New York Times is easily the world’s best known newspaper, its name carries around the weight of a long and proud journalistic tradition that has been recently bashed into the ground. They, along with The Washington Post, CNN and ABC wield massive power over public opinion. It’s important for these institutions to be trustworthy, something I hope they can one day achieve. But incidents like this end up providing people with just another reason to point to them and say “fake news”.
They have a responsibility to themselves, their readers and their detractors, however, sometimes it appears as though they don’t take that too seriously.
Luis Gonzalez is a lawyer from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas, Venezuela) currently working in private practice and is founder and co-editor of The Explorer. You can find him on Twitter at @lagm96.
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