EXC: Washington Post Refuses to Officially Retract Fake Georgia Fraud Trump Quote.
Following recent revelations of glaring falsehoods reported by The Washington Post, the Bezos-owned paper has told The National Pulse it will not retract the fake news item.
This week, the world learned of how The Washington Post published a false story, relying on a single source of information which turned out to be untrue. The story concerned the major, national news of President Trump making a phone call to Georgia State representatives regarding election fraud. Democrat Party officials relied on the fake news report to form the second impeachment case against Donald J. Trump.
The Post’s refusal to retract should throw up ethnical issues and concerns for its journalism union affiliates, stakeholders who rely on the Post for accurate reporting, and for Big Tech and social media companies who prioritize outlets like the Post and verify their reporters.
Historically, when news outlets have accidentally published fake news, they have retracted their stories. Now, the Post says it will buck that trend, offering instead a “correction.”
The National Pulse approached culprit reporter Amy Gardner, but instead got a response from the Post’s Vice President for Communications Shani George, who said:
“We corrected the story and published a separate news story last week—at the top of our site and on the front page—after we learned that our source had not been precise in relaying then President Trump’s words. We are not retracting our January story because it conveyed the substance of Trump’s attempt to influence the work of Georgia’s elections investigators.”
The story – in fact – was relatively free of substance without the fake news quote attributed to Trump. Hence the Post’s need to even change the headline.
The Washington Post still, unironically, maintains the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” masthead on its paper and website.
“We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year,” George told CBS News in 2017.
Now, she’s happy to service those millions of readers with false, unretracted news.
