The Washington Post's Costly Correction

 In January, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell story that former President Trump had urged an investigator to "find the fraud" in Georgia in an effort to alter his loss to President Biden in the state. They ran this juicy quote in their headline and stuck it in their lead, only to have to issue an embarrassingly long correction two months later that they had misquoted the former President in their story after an audio tape was released.

There are a few points that need to be made in light of this correction. Immediately after it was ran, everybody jumped all over the Post, and they deserve criticism of course. However, before we get into the original mistake, it is important to remember that the criticism needs to be in fact of the original error, and not of the large correction itself. We should be glad that one of the nation's largest newspapers would correct a major aspect of a bombshell story in the first place. A much worse alternative would be if our mainstream press refused to correct their ways and stayed committed to keeping false information up on its pages. So, for the act of actual issuing such an embarrassing correction, bravo.

Now, on to the criticism of running those quotes in the first place. This mistake cannot be excoriated enough. The Post ran incredibly damning quotes from the President to sell a front page story when they were only going off of what "a source" said, and not the confirmed words of the President that a reporter had heard with their own ears. This is disturbing for a couple of reasons. 

One, the Post had absolutely no need to run a story with details they could not confirm, because the already available details about the President's efforts to spread lies and misinformation about the election were plenty enough on their own. But by running those words and retracting them later, they give into the idea that the press is biased and incapable of factual reporting. But this runs completely against what the public should have taken away from Trump's meddling in Georgia, which he did in fact attempt to do. But because the Post could not resist running that story, they gave credibility to Trump's idea that all the allegations of his wrongdoings in Georgia were false, when in fact he did speak with the Secretary of State and he did lie about the results of the election countless times. 

Two, the Post should have known better. In fact, local reporters in Georgia did know better! To his credit, Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting did not run the same quotes that the Post did because he knew that he could not confirm them in a satisfactory way. Instead, he ran stories about Trump's meddling in Georgia that were verifiable and ironclad. We should expect more from national outlets, and perhaps they could learn from the great local reporters running the game in Georgia.