How does fake news get out there?

Well, based on this latest event, it comes not from Russian bots and fringe websites that the censorship lobby keeps howling about, but from the mainstream media itself, allowing its political biases to run wild at the expense of the facts.

According to the New York Post:

A PBS senior correspondent apologized Wednesday after falsely telling her audience that former President Donald Trump tried to talk Israel out of a cease-fire amid its ongoing war in Gaza.

Judy Woodruff passed off blame for the blunder by “clarifying” that she based the flimsy scoop on outside reporting she had read before broadcasting from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Monday.

“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the prime minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign,” Woodruff told a PBS roundtable.

Her apology is here:

NEWS

PBS’ Judy Woodruff has issued a clarification and an apology for her remarks in this clip which went viral.

“I want to clarify my remarks on the PBS News special on Monday night about the ongoing cease fire talks in the Middle East.

As I said, this was not based on my… pic.twitter.com/4nIhczmpj5

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 21, 2024

Which is pretty wretched as apologies go. By the sound of it, she made a little boo-boo, reporting an errant story someone else from another news agency wrote that was later corrected and didn't catch the correction in time for her report.

Which isn't exactly what went down.

First, some of the basic problems with that.

She's a big-name newscaster and commentator, so when she reports the news and does commentary for PBS, she's actually cribbing from other reporters?

What does that say about her own reporting, and do we now assume she's cribbing from other reporters with every report? So much for adding value, this sounds like telephone tag instead.

In her original errant report, she did say that "reports say," so credit for that, but why she didn't name the news agencies she cited? When I cite someone else's reporting, I always give the credit by the name. That she didn't is not good, either; it suggests she doesn't want viewers to look too closely.

She only named them out loud when she wanted to blame them for her error, which is pretty crummy, too.

But these are relatively small starter issues compared to the big ones in this 'apology' for fake news.

I checked the original stories she cited, from Axios, and Reuters, which was a properly cited pickup story, and they made their corrections pretty early in the histories of their pieces, both on August 15. The Post said that both stories ran on August 14, so it would have been just hours after their originals went out that by the wildest of coincidences, Woodruff read both stories in that tiny time window and then made her report apparently days later. Seems a pretty narrow window for her to read both errant stories and not go back to them as she prepared her report.

But it gets bad when one checks these original stories and finds that neither news outlet reported what she says they reported, not even in the original before corrections.

Here's Axios, which came out with the original story:

Driving the news: One source said Trump's call was intended to encourage Netanyahu to take the deal, but stressed he didn't know if this is indeed what the former president told Netanyahu.

The source didn't even know? While that is the sort of thing that shouldn't make the news at all -- the source admitted he had no idea what he was talking about -- Axios did have that in the original, which Woodruff reported as a certainty.

And the way that point was supported wasn't good, either:

Flashback: Last month, Trump said in an interview with Fox News that Israel needs to end the war in Gaza as soon as possible and bring back the hostages.

    In his meeting with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago a day after the Fox News interview, Trump said the situation with the hostages is very tough and that they have to be returned immediately.

That's not the same as Trump saying he wanted Bibi to accept or reject the ceasefire at the July meeting. It's just a generic statement of hopes for peace. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were saying largely the same thing in their statements about ending the war quickly, but they were clearly advocating for a ceasefire.

It's also nothing to do with the supposed phone call Trump made to Bibi, horning in on peace talks to help Kamala Harris, which never happened. The only information any of them were going on was the late July Bibi-Trump gettogether. So even Axios had a few things they could have done better, but they didn't make the kind of outright wrong and biased statement that Woodruff made.

The Reuters story was actually pretty balanced and careful, but leans towards Hamas hyperbole about the misery in Gaza. I can't tell if any passages were changed or deleted as Bibi made his denial about there being any phone call from Trump, it's possible they weren't. The report claims that Trump denied any such phone call, which may have happened, but they didn't cite a source other than Axios. The Axios report says that Team Trump didn't reply to them, so it's possible there was another source. But it's got that telephone-tag feeling again going.

They could have done better.

The most damning element of Woodruff's statement, that Trump urged Netanyahu to reject the ceasefire because it would help Harris in the 2024 presidential campaign -- never happened at all in either report, not even by wink, hint, or suggestion, not in the corrected or uncorrected versions. Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada.

Trump never did that. And they never reported that. Trump wouldn't even need to do that, as Bibi already knows which presidential candidate would be better for Israel.

I knew that claim was fake the minute I read it and put on my skepticism goggles.

It was completely made up by Woodruff.

Yet here Woodruff is, blaming other news agencies for her own error, focusing on some mild to moderately fuzzy elements of the stories open to interpretation, and making a blanket claim that Trump is busy interfering with the peace process in Gaza by phone, and for only the most venal and selfish reasons, to advance his presidential campaign, when nothing of the kind happened nor was ever reported to have happened.

The claim about Trump being venal, and horning in on other presidents is nothing but pure Democrat campaign propaganda, and Woodruff was in on it.

Her correction and apology was a way of saying 'look, squirrel!' at other news agencies instead of admit she made up the worst of her claims based on a bias for Democrat talking points about Trump being "out for himself."

That's a media bigshot who's in the tank, someone who at best allowed her own biases to corrupt her perception of facts, and at worst, was just spewing Democrat talking points to elect Kamala Harris. Fake news? You bet it's fake news -- as fake as the Democrats' Russia collusion hoax which the media reported as news.

It's a disgrace to news, and a good reason why the public doesn't trust the media at all. The apology was bad, the finger-pointing at others was bad, the effort to distract was bad, and the bias under the color of news was the worst.

Her credibility is shot with this one. She ought to go the way of Dan Rather, back when he got caught making up the news to advance his favored presidential candidate. It's the same thing.

Image: Twitter screen shot