Media

Trump Tweet Fact-Checked Three Times; Fact-Checkers Now Under Review

A media correction cycle that began in 2022 has entered what Bob Callahan calls its mature paperwork phase.

Three major fact-checking organizations have opened internal reviews after discovering that their corrections of a Trump tweet relied on a secondary source that had been corrected by a tertiary source citing the original tweet.

The tweet, posted in 2022, was originally labeled false, then mostly false, then missing context, then pending review, which is media terminology for everyone involved now wishes the file name were different.

"I could have told you that, and in fact I did, in paragraph nine, fourteen months ago." Bob Callahan

The Corrections

One outlet said the original fact-check was accurate at the time but became less accurate as the underlying facts aged. Another said it had corrected the correction correctly but failed to correct the note explaining why the correction had been corrected.

By late afternoon, Bob had added three entries to the OOPS LOG and created a tab labeled Recursion. He declined to comment further because the sandwich was still warm.