What on earth is happening at NBC News? It keeps muffing — or distorting — crucial story after crucial story.
Take its story this week on Team Biden’s release of “Merchant of Death” Viktor Bout in exchange for unjustly imprisoned WNBA star Brittney Griner. Citing a “senior US official,” NBC initially reported that Moscow offered Washington a choice: Bout for Griner or for Marine vet Paul Whelan, another Putin hostage.
Then came a “correction” to say that the choice was between Griner or no one. (Strange: Former National Security Advisor John Bolton says Russia already offered Team Trump a Whelan-for-Bout deal, which the then-president turned down.)
NBC’s correction syncs up with the White House line. How convenient.
This follows the Paul Pelosi puzzle. Soon after the vicious hammer attack on the House speaker’s husband, NBC News national correspondent Miguel Almaguer reported that Pelosi opened the door for police and didn’t attempt to escape, and even walked toward his attacker David DePape.
But NBC retracted that report, too — citing vague grounds of its not meeting “reporting standards” — and suspended Almaguer.
Again, the correction props up a narrative helpful to powerful Democrats. Are reporters getting facts wrong the first time, or “wrongly” not waiting to learn what they’re supposed to report?
Add in the insanity around NBC’s Dasha Burns’ reporting on John Fetterman. She interviewed the then-Senate candidate weeks before Election Day noted that “in small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”
For this remark — later vindicated 100% by Fetterman’s shambolic debate performance — Burns was roundly attacked by Fetterman defenders (including other media figures) who insisted that the stroke survivor was fine.
Burns, to her credit, stood firm. But NBC News’ more recent retractions make it look like the network has opted to stomp on reporters who dare counter the Dem narrative.
At the very least, it says a major network is having major trouble getting the basic facts of huge stories right. Your call on whether that’s a better defense.
