WHAT? – AT 6:45 P.M. ET:  THE WASHINGTON POST MADE A MISTAKE?  THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE.  THE WOKE NEVER MAKE A MISTAKE.  IT'S A BAD DREAM.  From Fox: 

The Washington Post made a massive correction Monday to a January report about a phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson, admitting it wrongly attributed multiple quotes to Trump based on an anonymous source.

The Post initially reported Trump had told an official working in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office to "find the fraud" in the state, which he lost narrowly to Joe Biden, and that she would be a "national hero" if she did.

However, a newly emerged recording of the Dec. 23 call found he didn't use those words. Instead, Trump said she would be "praised" when the "right answer comes out" and encouraged her to closely examine mail-in ballots in Fulton County, the heavily blue and most populated county in the state.

The Post published a lengthy correction to its story: "Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to "find the fraud" or say she would be "a national hero" if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find "dishonesty" there. He also told her that she had "the most important job in the country right now." A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump."

CNN also reported on the call citing an unnamed source and has not yet corrected its story, which charged Trump with saying "national hero" and "find the fraud" in its opening paragraph.

While news outlets often cite sources who paraphrase conversations they participated in or overheard, using quotes indicates to the reader a subject said those exact words.

"Our media are so, so, so breathtakingly corrupt," Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway tweeted. "They always mischaracterized this call -- in a corrupt and fraudulent way. But to actually make up quotes in service of that? We are so screwed by our disgustingly corrupt and unaccountable media."

After MSNBC's Hayes Brown defended the Post and praised its correction, Hemingway fired back that it was hardly a "self-policing win."

"So, they made up quotes. What in the actual F," conservative CNN commentator Mary Katharine Ham tweeted.

Conservative writer Mark Hemingway said the Post's correction and new headline did not adequately reflect its wrongdoing, calling the mistake "beyond serious" and indicative of the lack of accountability in corporate media.

COMMENT:   This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  It was long ago, back in the storied 1960s, when some journalists decided that simply reporting the news without fear or favor was beneath them.  They would report a "higher truth," one that often existed only between their ears.  They would "make a difference."  They would be "change agents."  They would "speak truth to power."  Ah, we know all the slogans, don't we?  And we know what those ideas have done to the American press. 

The most important virtue of a news service is credibility.   Lose that and nothing else matters.  And our press is losing just that.

March 15, 2021