Thursday, January 18, 2018

Trump reveals ‘Fake News Awards,’ website crashes

A blog titled “The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards” on the official Republican Party website shows the top winner of Trump’s fake news accolades to be New York Times columinist and economist Paul Krugman, who claimed on Election Day 2016 that the “economy would never recover” from Trump’s “historic, landslide victory,” according to a copy of the GOP blog archived by the nonprofit Internet Archive.

Second place went to ABC News' Brian Ross, whose reporting cited an anonymous source claiming that an associate of Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn was going to testify that Trump “directed him to make contact with the Russians” while being a presidential candidate. Ross, however, corrected his story to say that Trump was president-elect at the time, only after crashing the stock market.

CNN scooped third place. Without mentioning CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju by name, the award refers to a false report that Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., received advanced exclusive access to documents published by Wikileaks via email. Raju corrected it once he discovered that his anonymous source got the date of the email wrong, but not before several other news networks made the exact same error, also citing anonymous sources.

The so-called awards went on to list seven other inaccurate stories about Trump that were later corrected, from Trump removing a Martin Luther King, Jr. bust from the Oval Office, to Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda not shaking his hand, to false news of the Trump administration hiding a climate change report.

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