Despite ABC and PBS amplifying the fake Washington Post story about President Trump pressuring election investigators to “find the fraud” on air, the networks have refused to cover the story’s retraction.
“With the rest of the media scrambling to make the corrections in their online copies of the story, ABC News and PBS, who talked about the now-debunked order on-air, refused to give corresponding corrections to their viewers Monday,” Newsbusters notes.
On ABC’s Good Morning America program, correspondent Elwyn Lopez repeated the claims of the corrected Washington Post story on January 10th:
And the President’s false claims of voter fraud continue to be in the headlines. In a late December phone call, President Trump encouraged an election official here in Georgia to, quote, ‘find the fraud.’”
“But at no point, during Monday’s newscast, did ABC’s World News Tonight correct the record for viewers. Instead, anchor David Muir talked about the snow in Colorado, touted New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland (D) getting confirmed as the interior secretary, and fawned over the Oscar nominations,” Newsbusters adds.
Similarly, a January 10th PBS newscast carried the false Washington Post report. Anchor Hari Sreenivasan noted, “as Congress weighs impeaching Mr. Trump, there are new reports that the President interfered in Georgia’s election results beyond his now-public phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, The Washington Post reported yesterday that President Trump called a Georgia election investigator and pressured him to, quote, ‘Find the fraud’ in a phone call shortly before Christmas.”
Sreenivasan continued, “legal experts told The Post the President’s attempts to intervene in an ongoing investigation could amount to obstruction of justice or other criminal violations, but may be difficult to prove.”
The outlet has still refused to cover the story since revelations its central claims were fabricated.