Trump jumps on errors by news organizations

NEW YORK — Some stinging mistakes in stories involving President Donald Trump have given him fresh ammunition in his battle against the media while raising questions about whether news organizations need to peel back the curtain on how they operate.

The president tweeted six attacks on what he calls “fake news” over the weekend, saying the “out of control” media puts out purposely false and defamatory stories. That led to a contentious exchange at Monday’s White House press briefing between press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and CNN’s Jim Acosta.

“Journalists make honest mistakes,” Acosta said. “That doesn’t make them fake news.”

When Sanders responded that reporters should own up to their mistakes, one said, “we do.”

“Sometimes, but a lot of times you don’t,” she said. “There’s a very big difference between honest mistakes and purposely misleading the American people.”

Trump has his own issues: The Washington Post’s factchecking blog counted 1,628 false or misleading claims made by the president in his first 298 days in office.

Still, it was an undeniably bad week for news organizations reporting on investigations into the Trump campaigns dealings with Russia. ABC News suspended Brian Ross for incorrectly reporting the timing of a Trump directive to Michael Flynn. Several news outlets wrongly reported that Trump and his family’s bank records were the subject of the special prosecutor’s subpoena.

And CNN corrected a story on the timing of a tip to the Trump campaign about damaging information on Democrats.

With the hyper-speed of the modern news environment, the stories spread swiftly beyond their original source.

News organizations corrected themselves but fell short in their explanations, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When a mistake is made, the public really needs to understand why it was made and what corrections have been put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

Sanders specifically cited Ross’ story when asked for an example of one that was purposely misleading.

When CNN made its mistake a week later, its own executives did not talk publicly about it — even when the topic was discussed on the network’s weekend show about the media, “Reliable Sources.”

Network representatives, speaking without allowing a name to be attached, blamed the error on sources that provided information to reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb.

That still left questions: New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wondered, for example, how it was possible that different sources made the same error about a date.

CNN earlier this year fired journalists involved in a discredited story about former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci. CNN said — again, without allowing a name to be attached — Raju and Herb followed the network’s procedures for sensitive stories.

In the Scaramucci case, the reporters didn’t.