The following article by Glenn Kessler was posted on the Washington Post website May 16, 2018:
Most of the “Fake News” awards are about reports that were wrong — and quickly corrected. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
“Here’s where the president has a point, though. When does the mainstream media apologize to him? When did The Washington Post apologize for saying that he moved the MLK statue, when he did not?”
— Steve Cortes, former Trump campaign adviser, on CNN, May 14, 2018
A reader sent this clip to The Fact Checker, suggesting that it was worthy of a fact check. Regular readers know that we try to delve into weighty policy issues. We can’t claim this is about something weighty. Yet the missing Martin Luther King Jr. statue is an issue that keeps coming up, for reasons that are hard to understand. But perhaps it’s because the president listed it as item No. 4 in his “fake news awards” in early 2018.
This is also a good example of what-aboutism. Cortes, a frequent Trump surrogate on television, was trying to defend the White House for its refusal to apologize after an aide privately made a morbid joke about Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has an aggressive form of brain cancer. So Cortes responded with a “what-about” answer: What about the mainstream media’s refusal to apologize? Continue reading “The news media does apologize for mistakes, unlike the White House”