FILE TBL-0058
05 NOV 2024FiveThirtyEight (ABC News), Silver Bulletin
BAD CALL■ The claim
Final 2024 forecasts called the presidential race essentially a 50-50 toss-up. FiveThirtyEight gave Harris about a 50 percent chance and Trump about 49 percent, and Nate Silver's final model also landed at roughly 50-50 with a slight Harris edge.
■ What happened
Trump won all seven battleground states for 312 electoral votes and became the first Republican in two decades to win the national popular vote. Errors again ran in Democrats' favor, and the result was a clear win rather than a near tie. Forecasters note a sweep was within their range of outcomes, but the toss-up framing understated Trump's strength.
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FILE TBL-0057
02 NOV 2024The Des Moines Register, Selzer & Co.
BAD CALL■ The claim
Three days before the election, Ann Selzer's final Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 47 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in Iowa, which caused a national stir.
■ What happened
Trump won Iowa by about 13 points, roughly 56 percent to 43 percent, a miss of about 16 points. On November 17, 2024, Selzer announced in a Register op-ed that she was ending her election polling work. She later called the poll a spectacular miss but said the move had been planned and was not caused by the result.
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FILE TBL-0056
18 JUN 2024The New York Times, Major outlets relaying White House framing
BAD CALL■ The claim
In mid-June 2024, the White House called viral clips of President Biden "cheap fakes," and prominent coverage emphasized that videos fueling doubts about his age were misleadingly edited.
■ What happened
Several specific clips were in fact cropped or stripped of context, such as the G7 parachutist clip and the Los Angeles fundraiser clip, and fact-checks of them were accurate. But the emphasis on manipulation helped downplay concerns that proved well founded: Biden's June 27, 2024 debate performance alarmed his own party and he withdrew from the race on July 21. Some coverage, including the Times piece, did note real voter concerns about his age, so the failure lies in overall emphasis rather than factual error.
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FILE TBL-0055
16 MAR 2024The New York Times, ABC News, Associated Press, others (headlines)
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Headlines said Trump predicted a 'bloodbath' if he lost, which read as a threat of political violence.
■ What happened
At a March 16, 2024 rally in Ohio, Trump used the word while talking about Chinese-owned car plants in Mexico and his promise of 100% tariffs on their cars. Many headlines and social posts presented the line alone, and the Biden campaign tied it to January 6. FactCheck.org found the economic reading most plausible given the context, and PolitiFact said the headline-only versions gave an incomplete picture. Several stories did explain the auto context in their body text. The same speech included other contested remarks, such as doubting there would be another meaningful election if he lost, and those remain fair game for criticism.
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FILE TBL-0054
17 OCT 2023The New York Times, BBC, Others relaying Gaza Health Ministry figures
RETRACTED■ The claim
On Oct. 17, 2023, prominent headlines attributed an explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City to an Israeli airstrike and reported hundreds dead, relying on statements from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
■ What happened
U.S., French and other Western intelligence services assessed that a misfired rocket launched from within Gaza was the likely cause, and the U.S. estimated the death toll was probably at the low end of 100 to 300. On Oct. 23, 2023, The New York Times published an editors' note saying its early coverage relied too heavily on Hamas claims and left readers with an incorrect impression; the BBC also acknowledged it was wrong to speculate. Human Rights Watch later found the evidence pointed to a misfired rocket and an Israeli airstrike highly unlikely, while noting the munition could not be conclusively identified.
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FILE TBL-0053
10 OCT 2023Sinclair-owned stations, CNN (live coverage), many others
UNPROVEN■ The claim
Outlets reported that Hamas had killed and beheaded about 40 babies in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023.
■ What happened
The figure traced to an i24NEWS correspondent's on-scene report and spread fast, at times in headlines stated as fact. On October 12 an Israeli official told CNN the government could not confirm that babies had been beheaded. The White House also said President Biden had not seen the photos he had described. CNN's Sara Sidner apologized for saying on air that the prime minister's office had confirmed the beheadings. Hamas's October 7 atrocities, including the killing of children, are well documented. The specific count of 40 beheaded babies was never corroborated.
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FILE TBL-0052
07 NOV 2022Fox News, RealClearPolitics, FiveThirtyEight
BAD CALL■ The claim
Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Fox News hosts including Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo, plus commentators like Marc Thiessen, predicted a Republican wave or even a 'red tsunami.' RealClearPolitics projected Republicans would reach 54 Senate seats, and FiveThirtyEight's final forecast favored Republicans to win both chambers.
■ What happened
Republicans won the House by a narrow margin with only a single-digit net seat gain, well short of wave territory. Democrats held the Senate and expanded it to 51 seats after Raphael Warnock won Georgia's December runoff. Poll-based analysts later noted that the polls themselves were fairly accurate; the misses were mainly pundit expectations. Included for balance: this miss leaned toward Republicans.
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FILE TBL-0051
25 FEB 2022HuffPost, The Times (London), numerous outlets relaying Ukrainian officials
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Snake Island's 13 defenders were reported killed after defying a Russian warship, and a single Ukrainian ace, the 'Ghost of Kyiv', was said to be downing Russian jets.
■ What happened
On February 25, 2022, some outlets, including HuffPost, stated in headlines that the Snake Island garrison had been killed. Most outlets attributed this to Zelensky and other officials. On February 28, Ukraine's navy said the defenders were alive and had been captured by Russia. The Ghost of Kyiv spread through social media and official Ukrainian channels. In April 2022 the Times of London named a real pilot, killed in March, as the Ghost. Ukraine's Air Force then said the Ghost was a superhero legend standing for its pilots collectively, and the Times updated its story. Many careful outlets did label both claims as unverified.
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FILE TBL-0050
20 SEP 2021Axios, The New York Times, HuffPost, MSNBC, NPR (later commentary)
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Photos and video of mounted Border Patrol agents confronting Haitian migrants near Del Rio, Texas, were widely described as agents whipping or using whips on migrants.
■ What happened
The photographer who took the best-known images said he never saw anyone whipped and that the agent appeared to be swinging the horse's reins. Axios revised its piece and The New York Times corrected an article, saying it had overstated what was known and had seen no conclusive evidence anyone was struck. In July 2022 a CBP Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found no evidence that any agent struck a migrant with reins, though it did find unnecessary use of force, unprofessional conduct and offensive language, and four agents faced discipline.
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FILE TBL-0049
03 SEP 2021Rolling Stone, The Guardian, KFOR, MSNBC (Rachel Maddow, social media)
RETRACTED■ The claim
Rolling Stone, building on a KFOR interview with an Oklahoma ER doctor, ran a headline saying gunshot victims were left waiting because horse-dewormer overdoses were overwhelming Oklahoma hospitals.
■ What happened
On Sept. 4, 2021, Northeastern Health System Sequoyah, a hospital the doctor was linked to, said it had treated no patients for ivermectin complications and had turned away no one needing emergency care; it also said the doctor had not worked there in over two months. Rolling Stone added an update saying it could not independently verify any such cases and revised its headline. The doctor later said the coverage made it sound as if hospitals were full of ivermectin patients, which he said was not the case. Another hospital said it had seen only a handful of such patients.
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FILE TBL-0048
29 APR 2021The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC News
RETRACTED■ The claim
All three outlets reported that the FBI had warned Rudy Giuliani in 2019 that he was the target of a Russian disinformation operation.
■ What happened
On April 29, 2021, the outlets reported that Giuliani had received a so-called defensive briefing. On May 1, all three corrected their stories. According to the corrections, the FBI prepared such a briefing, but it was never given to him, partly over concerns about the criminal investigation of Giuliani. The Post also withdrew its claim that One America News had been warned. All three kept their reporting that the FBI saw Giuliani as a Russian target.
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FILE TBL-0047
09 JAN 2021The Washington Post
RETRACTED■ The claim
Citing an anonymous source, the Post reported that Trump told a Georgia elections investigator to find the fraud and that she would be a national hero.
■ What happened
The January 9, 2021 story attributed both phrases to Trump in a December 2020 phone call. In March 2021, Georgia officials released a recording of the call. It showed Trump urging the investigator to look at Fulton County ballots, where he said she would find dishonesty, but he did not use the quoted words. The Post corrected the story and took the misquotes out of the headline and body.
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FILE TBL-0046
08 JAN 2021The New York Times, many outlets citing it
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was reported to have died after rioters struck him with a fire extinguisher on January 6.
■ What happened
On January 8, 2021, the Times reported, citing two unnamed law enforcement officials, that Sicknick had been hit with a fire extinguisher. The claim spread widely. On February 16 the Times added an update saying officials now disputed whether he was struck at all. In April 2021, the D.C. Chief Medical Examiner ruled that he died of strokes and that the manner of death was natural. Capitol Police said he still died in the line of duty.
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FILE TBL-0045
02 NOV 2020National and state pollsters, Media poll sponsors
BAD CALL■ The claim
Final-stretch 2020 polls, widely reported by news outlets, showed Joe Biden with a large national lead and comfortable margins in key states.
■ What happened
Biden won, but by far less than polls indicated. The AAPOR task force found national polls overstated Biden's margin by about 3.9 points, the highest national popular-vote error in 40 years, and state presidential polls overstated it by about 4.3 points, the largest signed error in at least 20 years. The errors ran mostly in the Democrats' favor in Senate and governor races too.
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FILE TBL-0044
28 OCT 2020ABC News, The Washington Post
BAD CALL■ The claim
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released a week before Election Day showed Biden leading Trump 57 percent to 40 percent among likely Wisconsin voters, a 17-point lead.
■ What happened
Biden carried Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes, roughly 0.6 percentage points, a result confirmed by a recount. The poll missed the margin by more than 16 points and was widely cited afterward as one of the cycle's biggest misses.
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FILE TBL-0043
19 OCT 2020Politico
DEBUNKED■ The claim
After the New York Post published emails from a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden, Politico ran a story headlined that the story was Russian disinformation according to dozens of former intelligence officials. The 51 signers' letter itself said they had no evidence of Russian involvement, only that it bore the earmarks of an information operation; Twitter and Facebook limited the Post's story.
■ What happened
In March 2022 The New York Times reported that emails from the cache had been authenticated by people familiar with them, and The Washington Post had forensic experts verify thousands of emails from the data. No evidence emerged that the laptop was a Russian operation. In June 2024 federal prosecutors used the laptop and its messages as evidence in Hunter Biden's gun trial, where an FBI agent testified about its contents (on cross-examination she said she could not personally rule out changes before the FBI obtained it). Twitter's CEO later called blocking the Post story a mistake.
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FILE TBL-0042
26 AUG 2020CBS News (Face the Nation), MSNBC
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Coverage of the August 2020 Kenosha shootings repeatedly said Rittenhouse had brought or carried his rifle from Illinois into Wisconsin, a detail used to suggest he arrived armed for a fight.
■ What happened
Trial testimony showed the rifle was bought in Wisconsin by his friend Dominick Black and kept in Kenosha; Rittenhouse picked it up after arriving there. He was acquitted on all charges on Nov. 19, 2021, after the jury heard his self-defense case. Two days later a CBS Face the Nation report still said he came from Illinois armed for battle; CBS added an editor's note to the transcript acknowledging he testified he did not drive to Kenosha with a weapon, and apologized.
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FILE TBL-0041
26 JUN 2020The New York Times
UNPROVEN■ The claim
The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence had concluded a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered Taliban-linked militants bounties for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan. The story set off weeks of coverage of what the president knew.
■ What happened
In April 2021 the Biden administration said the intelligence community had only low-to-moderate confidence in the assessment, in part because it relied on detainee interrogations and the difficult Afghan operating environment. A senior defense official said evidence that bounties were actually paid still had not been found, and the administration did not sanction Russia over the matter. The claim has never been proven false, but it also was never corroborated to the level the original reporting implied.
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FILE TBL-0040
21 JUN 2020Sports Illustrated, national outlets broadly (relaying NASCAR's statement)
DEBUNKED■ The claim
A noose was left in Black driver Bubba Wallace's Talladega garage stall, and the coverage treated it as a deliberate racist act aimed at him.
■ What happened
On June 21, 2020, NASCAR announced a noose had been found in Wallace's stall, called it a heinous act, and federal civil-rights investigators were called in. Coverage widely treated it as a hate act aimed at Wallace. Two days later the FBI and U.S. Attorney said no federal crime had been committed. The rope was a garage-door pull tied in a noose-like loop, and it had been hanging there since October 2019, long before Wallace was assigned that stall.
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FILE TBL-0039
01 JUN 2020NPR, Many national outlets
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Outlets reported that police tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square to clear the way for President Trump's walk to St. John's Church and his Bible photo op. NPR's headline stated the clearing was done to clear the way for the photo op.
■ What happened
The Interior Department Inspector General found the evidence did not support a finding that Park Police cleared the park so the president could walk to the church. Instead, the operation was planned so a contractor could safely install anti-scale fencing after two days of property damage and dozens of injured officers, and Park Police learned of the president's possible movement only in mid-to-late afternoon, after planning had begun. The report did not assess individual uses of force, did not interview the attorney general or White House officials, and found CS gas was used on 17th Street (not by Park Police), so the 'tear gas' element was not disproven, only the photo-op motive.
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FILE TBL-0038
16 FEB 2020The Washington Post, Facebook (platform policy)
RETRACTED■ The claim
In February 2020 The Washington Post said Sen. Tom Cotton was repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that had already been debunked, after he raised the possibility that the virus came from a Wuhan lab. Facebook later treated claims that the virus was man-made as removable misinformation.
■ What happened
No investigation had actually settled the virus's origin. In late May 2021, as the Biden administration ordered a fresh intelligence review, Facebook said it would no longer remove claims that COVID-19 was man-made, and The Washington Post corrected its 2020 story, removing the words "debunked" and "conspiracy theory" and changing the headline to describe a disputed fringe theory. In 2023 the Energy Department (low confidence) and FBI (moderate confidence) said a lab-related origin was most likely, and in January 2025 the CIA said the same with low confidence. The origin remains unresolved; other agencies have favored natural spillover, also with low confidence.
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FILE TBL-0037
28 JAN 2020BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post
BAD CALL■ The claim
In late January 2020, prominent headlines told Americans the flu was a bigger worry than the new coronavirus.
■ What happened
BuzzFeed News ran a January 28, 2020 piece headlined 'Don't Worry About the Coronavirus. Worry About the Flu.' The Washington Post's late-January story, printed around February 1, said the flu was a much bigger threat than coronavirus for now. To be fair, both reflected what many public-health experts were saying then, when U.S. cases were very few, and the Post's headline did say 'for now'. Within six weeks the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and it became far deadlier in the U.S. than a typical flu season.
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FILE TBL-0036
28 NOV 2019Newsweek
RETRACTED■ The claim
Newsweek reported that Trump would spend Thanksgiving 2019 tweeting and golfing.
■ What happened
Newsweek's November 28, 2019 story described Trump's holiday plans that way, while he was in fact making a secret trip to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Newsweek substantially rewrote the story that evening. It then said it had corrected the story, fired the reporter, and demoted an editor.
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FILE TBL-0035
13 OCT 2019ABC News (World News Tonight, Good Morning America)
RETRACTED■ The claim
ABC aired footage that it presented as Turkey's attack on Kurdish-held northern Syria.
■ What happened
On October 13 and 14, 2019, World News Tonight and Good Morning America ran a clip described as showing the Turkish assault on Syria. Viewers matched it to a nighttime machine-gun shoot at Kentucky's Knob Creek Gun Range, filmed in 2017. ABC removed the video, posted a correction, and said it regretted the error.
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FILE TBL-0034
14 SEP 2019The New York Times, NBC News, Major outlets (Swetnick declaration, 2018)
UNPROVEN■ The claim
A September 2019 New York Times Sunday Review essay adapted from a book by two Times reporters presented a new allegation of Kavanaugh's college misconduct; in 2018, Julie Swetnick's sworn declaration of drugging and gang rapes at parties was widely broadcast.
■ What happened
The Times essay left out the book's statement that the alleged victim declined to be interviewed and, according to friends, did not recall the incident; the Times added an editor's note a day later. Swetnick's account shifted in an October 2018 NBC interview, and NBC later reported that a supporting witness denied having seen what was attributed to her. None of these allegations was corroborated. This entry does not concern, and makes no finding about, Christine Blasey Ford's allegation.
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FILE TBL-0033
29 JAN 2019NPR, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Actor Jussie Smollett was widely reported, based on his account and initial police statements, to have been the victim of a racist and homophobic assault by two men in Chicago in January 2019. Many commentators and public figures treated the attack as established fact.
■ What happened
Within weeks Chicago police said Smollett had paid two brothers to stage the attack, and he was charged with filing a false report. Charges were dropped in March 2019, then a special prosecutor re-indicted him, and in December 2021 a jury convicted him on five counts of disorderly conduct for lying to police. In November 2024 the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the conviction on a procedural ground: the state had to honor the earlier deal that dropped the charges. The court did not find him innocent, and the special prosecutor said the ruling had nothing to do with innocence.
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FILE TBL-0032
19 JAN 2019The Washington Post, CNN (on-screen caption), others
RETRACTED■ The claim
Coverage of the Lincoln Memorial encounter with Covington Catholic students described Native American activist Nathan Phillips as having fought in the Vietnam War.
■ What happened
The Post's January 19, 2019 story said Phillips fought in Vietnam. On January 22 the Post corrected it: Phillips served in the Marines from 1972 to 1976 but was never deployed to Vietnam. A CNN caption had also wrongly labeled him a Vietnam veteran, while he described himself as a Vietnam-era veteran. On March 1, 2019, a Post editor's note said later video and reporting contradicted or failed to confirm other parts of its original account.
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FILE TBL-0031
19 JAN 2019The Washington Post, CNN, NBC News
RETRACTED■ The claim
Based on a short viral clip, national outlets portrayed a group of Covington Catholic High School students, especially junior Nick Sandmann, as having surrounded, taunted and blocked a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, near the Lincoln Memorial.
■ What happened
Longer video that surfaced within days showed a more complicated scene, including a separate group shouting at the students before Phillips walked into their crowd. On March 1, 2019, The Washington Post published an editor's note saying later evidence contradicted or failed to confirm its initial accounts that a student blocked Phillips, that the students had taunted his group beforehand, and that they were trying to start a conflict. Sandmann sued several outlets; CNN, the Post and NBCUniversal each settled for undisclosed sums. His suits against The New York Times, ABC, CBS, Rolling Stone and Gannett were dismissed because courts treated the challenged statements as Phillips's protected opinion, a ruling the Sixth Circuit upheld in August 2023.
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FILE TBL-0030
17 JAN 2019BuzzFeed News
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Citing two federal law enforcement officials, BuzzFeed News reported that President Trump personally directed his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, and that the special counsel had learned this from witnesses and documents.
■ What happened
The next evening the Special Counsel's Office, through spokesman Peter Carr, said BuzzFeed's description of specific statements and evidence was not accurate, a rare public rebuttal. The April 2019 Mueller report found the evidence did not establish that Trump directed or aided Cohen's false testimony, and it recorded Cohen saying Trump did not tell him to lie. BuzzFeed added an update and an editor's note acknowledging Mueller's conclusion. It did not formally retract the story.
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FILE TBL-0029
27 NOV 2018The Guardian
UNPROVEN■ The claim
Citing unnamed sources, The Guardian (Luke Harding and Dan Collyns) reported that Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange at Ecuador's London embassy in 2013, 2015 and around March 2016, months before WikiLeaks released the Democratic emails.
■ What happened
Manafort, Assange's lawyers and WikiLeaks all denied that any meeting took place, and no other outlet independently confirmed the visits. The Mueller report, which covers WikiLeaks and Manafort in detail, says nothing about any Manafort–Assange meeting. Critics said the Guardian later softened some wording; the paper has not retracted the story. Whether the meetings happened remains unproven.
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FILE TBL-0028
13 APR 2018McClatchy
DEBUNKED■ The claim
McClatchy reported that Mueller's investigators had evidence Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague in late summer 2016, which would have confirmed a key Steele dossier allegation. A follow-up in December 2018 said Cohen's phone had pinged cell towers near Prague around that time.
■ What happened
The Mueller report states plainly that Cohen had never traveled to Prague. The DOJ Inspector General's December 2019 report says the FBI determined that the dossier's Prague allegation about Cohen was not true. McClatchy added editor's notes to both stories in April 2019 but stood by them, arguing the Mueller report did not address the phone-ping claim.
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FILE TBL-0027
08 DEC 2017CNN
RETRACTED■ The claim
CNN reported that on Sept. 4, 2016, an email offered Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. a website and decryption key for hacked WikiLeaks documents, which would have been before the documents were public.
■ What happened
The Washington Post obtained the email and found it was sent on Sept. 14, 2016, the day after WikiLeaks had already released the material publicly. CNN corrected the date and headline and acknowledged the email was less significant than it had reported. CNN said its two sources had given the wrong date and that it did not believe they meant to mislead.
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FILE TBL-0026
05 DEC 2017Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal
RETRACTED■ The claim
Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that Special Counsel Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records of President Trump's and his family's accounts, saying the probe had zeroed in on Trump's own business dealings.
■ What happened
Within a day both outlets corrected their stories. Bloomberg removed 'Trump's' from its headline and fixed the claim that Mueller had zeroed in on Trump. The WSJ said the subpoena concerned people or entities close to Trump rather than the president's own accounts. Trump's side publicly denied that his own records had been subpoenaed. A subpoena to Deutsche Bank did occur; the error was in saying it targeted Trump's own records.
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FILE TBL-0025
01 DEC 2017ABC News
RETRACTED■ The claim
Citing a confidant of Michael Flynn, Brian Ross reported on air that Flynn was ready to testify that candidate Trump had directed him to make contact with Russian officials during the campaign.
■ What happened
The source had actually said Trump made that request after the election, as president-elect, about matters such as cooperating against ISIS. Ross 'clarified' that evening and ABC issued a formal correction. The network called the original report a serious error and suspended Ross for four weeks without pay.
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FILE TBL-0024
06 NOV 2017CNN, The Guardian, Bloomberg, CBS News
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Headlines, tweets and tightly cropped clips presented President Trump as impatiently dumping an entire box of fish food into a koi pond at Akasaka Palace while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looked on.
■ What happened
The full pool video showed Abe emptying his own box into the pond first, with Trump following his host's lead. Some write-ups, including CNN's own article text, mentioned Abe's action, but the widely shared headlines, tweets and cropped clips focused on Trump alone and left that context out. Fact-checkers rated the viral framing misleading.
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FILE TBL-0023
15 AUG 2017The Atlantic, Many national outlets
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Coverage of Trump's Aug. 15, 2017 press conference framed his 'very fine people on both sides' remark as a defense of white nationalists, and the shorthand that he called neo-Nazis very fine people was repeated for years. The Atlantic's headline said he defended white-nationalist protesters.
■ What happened
The official White House transcript shows that in the same exchange Trump said he was not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be condemned totally, and claimed others at the rally were there to protest a statue's removal. In June 2024 Snopes rated the claim that he called neo-Nazis and white supremacists very fine people False. Snopes also noted that whether there were in fact 'very fine people' among a rally organized by white nationalists is itself questionable; the debunking is limited to who he said the phrase applied to.
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FILE TBL-0022
22 JUN 2017CNN
RETRACTED■ The claim
A CNN investigative article said Congress was examining a Russian investment fund (the Russian Direct Investment Fund) whose CEO had allegedly met Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci shortly before the inauguration. The story rested on a single anonymous source.
■ What happened
CNN took the story down the next night, saying it did not meet its editorial standards, and apologized to Scaramucci. On June 26, 2017, CNN accepted the resignations of the reporter (Thomas Frank), the editor (Eric Lichtblau) and the executive editor of CNN Investigates (Lex Haris). People familiar with CNN's internal review said it found a serious breakdown in process rather than proof that the story was false.
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FILE TBL-0021
06 JUN 2017CNN
RETRACTED■ The claim
Citing sources, CNN reported that James Comey would dispute Trump's claim that Comey had told him he was not under investigation.
■ What happened
On June 6, 2017, CNN reported, citing unnamed sources, that Comey's testimony would contradict Trump's account. The next day Comey released his prepared statement. It confirmed he had told Trump on three occasions that he was not personally under investigation. CNN corrected the story and revised its headline and text.
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FILE TBL-0020
20 JAN 2017TIME
RETRACTED■ The claim
On Inauguration Day, a White House pool report and TIME's Zeke Miller reported that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been taken out of the Oval Office.
■ What happened
The bust had not moved and was still in the room. Within about 40 minutes a White House aide told Miller the bust was still there, and he sent a correction to the press pool, corrected the TIME story, tweeted the correction and apologized. The White House still cited the error repeatedly, and TIME published a note to readers rejecting the claim that it was deliberate.
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FILE TBL-0019
10 JAN 2017BuzzFeed News, Mother Jones
UNPROVEN■ The claim
Mother Jones reported in October 2016 that a veteran Western spy had given the FBI memos alleging a years-long Russian operation to cultivate and compromise Donald Trump. In January 2017 BuzzFeed published the full 35-page dossier, noting it was unverified, and its allegations drove years of coverage.
■ What happened
The Justice Department Inspector General found that Steele's Primary Sub-source told the FBI in January 2017 that much of the material was word of mouth, hearsay, or remarks made in jest, and that the FBI had not corroborated the core allegations. Special Counsel Durham's 2023 report states the FBI was not able to corroborate a single substantive allegation in the Steele reports despite long efforts. Some specific claims, such as Michael Cohen meeting Kremlin representatives in Prague, were found to have no supporting evidence. BuzzFeed did flag the material as unverified, and a Florida judge ruled its publication protected by the fair-report privilege, so it was not retracted.
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FILE TBL-0018
30 DEC 2016The Washington Post
RETRACTED■ The claim
Citing unnamed U.S. officials, The Washington Post reported that code tied to a Russian hacking operation had been found inside a Vermont utility, which it said showed that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electricity grid.
■ What happened
Burlington Electric said it had found suspicious traffic on a single laptop that was not connected to its grid systems, and that this kind of traffic had been seen elsewhere in the country. The Post changed its headline and appended an editor's note saying an earlier version had wrongly reported a grid penetration. A follow-up said the utility may not have been targeted by Russia at all, and that the malware found was a common commercial strain.
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FILE TBL-0017
24 NOV 2016The Washington Post
RETRACTED■ The claim
The Post reported that a Russian propaganda campaign helped spread fake news during the 2016 election, relying in part on an anonymous group, PropOrNot, which listed 200+ sites as propaganda outlets or echoes.
■ What happened
Craig Timberg's November 24, 2016 story cited PropOrNot's findings without naming the sites on its list. The list included independent outlets such as Naked Capitalism and Truthdig. After criticism from The Intercept, CJR and others, the Post added an editor's note in December. It said the Post did not vouch for PropOrNot's findings on any individual outlet and that the group had since removed some sites. Critics called the note non-apologetic.
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FILE TBL-0016
09 NOV 2016The New York Times
BAD CALL■ The claim
Writing on election night as stock futures plunged, NYT columnist Paul Krugman said the first-pass answer to when markets would recover was never, and that the world was probably facing a global recession with no end in sight.
■ What happened
The sell-off reversed within hours. The Dow closed at a record high on November 10, 2016, and posted its best week in five years. On November 11, Krugman wrote on his NYT blog that he was retracting his call, saying he had succumbed to the temptation to predict immediate collapse.
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FILE TBL-0015
08 NOV 2016Princeton Election Consortium, CNN
BAD CALL■ The claim
Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance in one version of its model (93 percent in its final revised projection), calling the race for her in October. On CNN's Smerconish shortly before the election, Wang said he would eat a bug if Trump won more than 240 electoral votes.
■ What happened
Trump won well over 240 electoral votes. On November 12, 2016, Wang returned to CNN and ate a cricket on air. He later said he had underestimated the size of correlated polling error and that his false certainty was the big lesson.
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FILE TBL-0014
08 NOV 2016The New York Times
BAD CALL■ The claim
The New York Times' Upshot forecast put Hillary Clinton's chance of winning the presidency at roughly 85 percent heading into Election Day, listed at 84 percent in its final reading, giving Trump about 16 percent.
■ What happened
Trump won the Electoral College, carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where state polls had shown Clinton ahead. The industry's own review found that state polls in the upper Midwest understated Trump's support. The Upshot later published its own review of why key state polls were wrong.
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FILE TBL-0013
08 NOV 2016HuffPost
BAD CALL■ The claim
HuffPost Pollster's presidential model put Hillary Clinton's chance of winning at about 98 percent on Election Day. Days earlier, HuffPost Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim wrote that Nate Silver's far less confident FiveThirtyEight forecast was tilting the polls toward Trump and amounted to guesswork dressed up as math.
■ What happened
Donald Trump won the Electoral College. The morning after, HuffPost's polling editors wrote that the polls had missed and that their presidential and Senate forecasts had failed because they relied on those polls. On November 9, Grim publicly apologized to Silver and said Silver was right that there was much more uncertainty than HuffPost had accounted for.
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FILE TBL-0012
31 OCT 2016Slate
DEBUNKED■ The claim
Slate reported that computer scientists studying DNS logs believed a Trump Organization server was carrying on a sustained, human-like pattern of communication with servers of Russia's Alfa Bank, suggesting a covert channel. The piece called the evidence suggestive rather than conclusive.
■ What happened
The FBI investigated and, per the DOJ Inspector General, concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such cyber links. The Durham report quotes the FBI's Chicago field office assessing with high confidence that the servers almost certainly did not communicate intentionally or covertly; FBI cyber analysts and Alfa Bank's outside forensic firm also found no evidence of a secret channel. Durham found the data had been pushed to reporters and the FBI by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann and Fusion GPS. Sussmann was acquitted in May 2022 of lying to the FBI about who he represented, but the trial and report did not revive the server theory. Slate never retracted the story.
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FILE TBL-0011
24 OCT 2016The Washington Post (The Fix)
BAD CALL■ The claim
Two weeks before the 2016 election, a Washington Post analysis headline declared that Donald Trump's chances of winning were approaching zero.
■ What happened
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake's October 24, 2016 analysis for The Fix read the state polling as leaving Trump almost no path to 270 electoral votes. Many forecasters and analysts shared that view at the time. Trump won the election on November 8, 2016, and Congress certified 304 electoral votes for him in January 2017.
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FILE TBL-0010
23 SEP 2016Yahoo News, The Washington Post
UNPROVEN■ The claim
Yahoo News reported that U.S. intelligence officials were probing whether Trump adviser Carter Page had opened private channels with senior Kremlin officials, including talk of lifting sanctions. In April 2017 the Washington Post reported the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant on the basis that Page was acting as an agent of Russia, and he was widely portrayed as a suspected Russian agent.
■ What happened
Page was never charged. The DOJ Inspector General found at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the four Page FISA applications, including that the FBI left out that Page had been an approved operational contact for the CIA from 2008 to 2013. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith inserted the words 'not a source' into a CIA email used for the final renewal and pleaded guilty in August 2020 to making a false statement. DOJ told the FISA court that at least the last two warrants lacked sufficient predication and were not valid. The Yahoo story drew on Steele's information and was itself cited in the FISA application; Page's defamation suit against Yahoo was dismissed, so it was not retracted.
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FILE TBL-0009
17 JUL 2015HuffPost, FiveThirtyEight
BAD CALL■ The claim
In July 2015, HuffPost announced it would cover Trump's campaign in its Entertainment section rather than Politics, calling it a sideshow. In November 2015, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver told the media to stop freaking out about Trump's poll leads, putting his nomination chances at well under 20 percent.
■ What happened
Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination and then the presidency. In May 2016, Silver published a self-critique admitting FiveThirtyEight's early Trump estimates were overconfident, were not based on a statistical model, and that he had acted like the pundits he usually criticized.
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FILE TBL-0008
19 NOV 2014Rolling Stone
RETRACTED■ The claim
Rolling Stone published a detailed account of a student, called Jackie, being gang-raped at a University of Virginia fraternity party, and portrayed the university as indifferent.
■ What happened
Reporting by other outlets quickly found the account could not be corroborated, and police found no evidence to support it. Rolling Stone retracted the story on April 5, 2015, and published a Columbia Journalism School review describing failures in reporting, editing and fact-checking. In November 2016 a jury found Rolling Stone and writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely liable for defaming UVA associate dean Nicole Eramo, with $3 million in damages; the fraternity separately settled with the magazine.
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FILE TBL-0007
18 AUG 2014NPR, Cable and national news broadly
DEBUNKED■ The claim
After Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, coverage widely relayed witness accounts that Brown had his hands raised in surrender when he was killed, which became the rallying cry of the protests.
■ What happened
A March 4, 2015 Justice Department investigation concluded the surrender accounts were not credible: some conflicted with physical and forensic evidence, some witnesses recanted, and credible witnesses said Brown was moving toward Wilson. The DOJ declined to charge Wilson. Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, who had embraced the slogan, wrote that it was built on a falsehood. The DOJ separately documented a pattern of racial bias in the Ferguson Police Department.
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FILE TBL-0006
18 APR 2013New York Post
RETRACTED■ The claim
The Post's front page showed two young men at the marathon under the headline 'Bag Men', implying federal investigators were looking for them.
■ What happened
The April 18, 2013 cover ran a photo of Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi with a subhead saying the feds were seeking them. Neither man had any link to the bombing, and the real suspects, the Tsarnaev brothers, were identified hours later. The Post defended the cover at first, and the two men sued for defamation. The case settled on undisclosed terms in late September 2014.
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FILE TBL-0005
17 APR 2013CNN, Associated Press, Fox News
RETRACTED■ The claim
On April 17, 2013, CNN reported that a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had been arrested.
■ What happened
CNN's John King reported that a suspect had been identified, and CNN then reported that an arrest had been made. The AP and Fox News aired similar reports. The FBI, the U.S. Attorney's office, and Boston police all said no arrest had been made, and CNN walked the report back that afternoon. King later called the network's mistakes embarrassing. No arrest took place until April 19.
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FILE TBL-0004
14 DEC 2012Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Gawker, others
RETRACTED■ The claim
Many outlets named Ryan Lanza as the Sandy Hook Elementary gunman, and some circulated his Facebook profile and photo.
■ What happened
Early on December 14, 2012, outlets citing law enforcement sources named Ryan Lanza as the shooter. Some outlets and journalists then spread his Facebook page. The gunman was his younger brother, Adam. The AP later reported that an official had mixed up the brothers' first names. AP, the LA Times, and HuffPost acknowledged the error, and Ryan Lanza publicly protested that he had nothing to do with it.
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FILE TBL-0003
20 JUL 2012ABC News
RETRACTED■ The claim
During live coverage of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, ABC's Brian Ross suggested that a Jim Holmes listed with a Colorado Tea Party group might be the suspect.
■ What happened
On the morning of July 20, 2012, Ross raised a possible Tea Party link on Good Morning America, based on a web page for a different Jim Holmes. Later in the coverage he said on air that the report was wrong, and ABC News and Ross apologized for airing it before it was checked. ABC added an editor's note to its online story. ABC News president Ben Sherwood later called it an unfortunate mistake that did not meet the network's standards.
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FILE TBL-0002
27 MAY 2012BBC News
RETRACTED■ The claim
BBC News ran a photo of rows of shrouded bodies as an image of the Houla massacre in Syria.
■ What happened
The BBC used an image circulating on Twitter, attributed to Syrian activists, with a note that it could not be independently verified. The photo was actually taken by Marco Di Lauro in Iraq in 2003. Di Lauro said publicly he was astonished the BBC used it without checking the source. The BBC removed it, and its social media editor admitted the checks should have been more thorough and apologized. The massacre itself, in which more than 100 people were killed, was real.
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FILE TBL-0001
27 MAR 2012NBC News (Today)
RETRACTED■ The claim
NBC's Today show aired a version of George Zimmerman's 911 call that made it sound as if he volunteered that Trayvon Martin was Black.
■ What happened
The Today segment of March 27, 2012 cut out the dispatcher's question asking about the person's race, so Zimmerman's answer sounded unprompted. NBC said an internal review found a production error it deeply regretted, and it apologized to viewers. A Miami-based producer was fired. Zimmerman sued NBC for defamation. Judge Debra Nelson dismissed the suit on June 30, 2014, ruling that Zimmerman was a public figure and had not shown actual malice. He lost his appeal in December 2015.
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