MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: I think there are a couple of problems. One is that the media keep using anonymous sources who keep getting things wrong, and there’s no accountability when you’re using anonymous source. There’s no way you can say, “Well, I know I shouldn’t be trusting this person,” because we don’t know the people who are involved.
The other issue is this sort of animosity toward Trump that make all the errors happen in one direction. This is not the first time there’s been a major correction on a story that’s really big, and they always go in this sort of anti-Trump direction. That suggests that it’s not just what happens sometimes in journalism, which sometimes stories get wrong.
ED HENRY: People make mistakes.
HEMINGWAY: But there’s something else going on here, that is something we also probably saw in the 2016 election: an inability to understand what was happening in the country, and just on a very important big story. And here, this is a big, important story.
HENRY: Sure, and another big important story to your point, when ABC News Brian Ross, they got that story wrong about Michael Flynn, which is that “he’s prepared to testify that during the campaign he colluded with the Russians,” that all of a sudden the narrative was true. And ABC bought it hard, and really, it blew up in their face.
HEMINGWAY: It’s been happening throughout the media. CNN last had a series of problematic stories on the overall story of Russia collusion and investigation of same, including that they said that James Comey was going to testify that he never told Donald Trump he wasn’t under investigation when in fact he testified that he said it three times.
And again, no one is held accountable. No one gets fired, or very rarely does anyone get fired, or we (ever) see media taking it seriously.
ED HENRY: Rarely do we see a scoop saying, “Donald Trump is innocent.”
HEMINGWAY: Well, and just yesterday, there was that big story about the judge saying about the Mueller probe that we have serious problems here. It’s not that it didn’t get coverage. But it didn’t get that hysteria that you’re seeing with so many other issues.