In this day in age, it’s unbelievably important for people to conduct their own investigations when it comes to the news. Unfortunately, we live during a time when fake news is more likely to appear than actual investigative reporting, which is why every one of us needs to think for ourselves. Thanks to reporters that would rather have a breaking story than tell the truth, the public has gotten quite a few laughs in the past. Keep reading to find out the top ten most embarrassing flubs from the media and what they did to cover their butts when the truth was exposed.As it turns out, Fortune was a little full of it when they made the announcement that C-SPAN had been hacked by Russia. Soon after the statement was released, C-SPAN said: “C-SPAN.org was not hacked. We have determined that during testing for inaugural coverage, RT’s signal was mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-SPAN1’s signal to the internet, rather than to an unused backup.” Of course, to protect what credibility they still had, Fortune ran a correction immediately after C-SPAN made their announcement.
Of course, this caused an incredible amount of panic, outrage, and threats from political leaders in the U.S. Throughout the next couple of days, the Washington Post continued to edit the story, diluting its contents, until they eventually admitted that the malware was found on a computer that wasn’t even linked to the U.S. electrical grid. Soon after, they admitted that the story was entirely false and had nothing to do with Russia.
In their report, the Washington Post accused “more than 200 websites” of being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.” They also added that “stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times.” It seems that the paper should do better investigative reporting because the statistics they found were provided by a new group who took it upon themselves to classify well-known left-wing and libertarian websites as “Russian propaganda outlets.” Once they realized their mistake, the Washington Post released an editor’s note in addition to the article.
According to that report, Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was allegedly involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under the Senate investigation. Of course, he wasn’t involved, at all. CNN eventually retracted the story and fired the three reporters who published it.
In the report, they accused Russia of attacking U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic or microwave weapon so sophisticated that the Pentagon had no clue what was going on. Eventually, neurologists were brought in to conduct their own investigations. After some time, they began to suspect that the personnel members weren’t suffering from a brain injury, but instead, they were experiencing collective psychosomatic symptoms. They also found that the “strange sounds” the “diplomats” had reported hearing were actually the mating calls of the common Caribbean male cricket.
In the report, Trump was accused of creating a secret internet server to communicate with a bank in Russia. Of course, this was entirely untrue, but Hillary Clinton didn’t mind using it to her advantage in order to slander Trump’s position.
In the report, they accused Manafort of managing to sneak into the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to visit Julian Assange on three different dates. Of course, media outlets exploded with the news. Still, seven weeks had passed and no other media outlet was able to confirm the allegations. The Guardian refused to answer questions, and the editors were nowhere to be seen. Eventually, an Ecuadorian official stated that the story was completely fabricated.
In the report, CNN stated that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting ahead of time. However, CNN was caught lying about Lanny Davis declining to comment, when in fact, Davis was the only source for CNN at the time. Eventually, Davis admitted it was a lie, causing other media outlets to retract the story.
In the report, Buzzfeed wrote that Robert Mueller had possession of internal emails and witness interviews that proved that Trump was indeed guilty of instructing Cohen to lie to Congress. After a bit of media frenzy, Mueller’s office released a statement saying that Buzzfeed was wrong and they had no such information.
In the report, they accused Donald Trump Jr. of receiving an email that directed him to advance access to the treasure trove of DNC and Podesta emails that were published by WikiLeaks. This meant that Donald Trump Jr. knew about the archive before the whole world did, but of course, the news outlets got the entire story wrong. The email that Donald Trump Jr. received came AFTER the WikiLeaks was released to the public. To this day, MSNBC and CNN have remained silent on how their “multiple, independent sources” got the date of the email wrong.
