President Donald Trump has announced the “winners” of his “Fake News Awards.” While the link failed to open for many amid the high internet traffic, a web archive reveals the New York Times and CNN are among the top recipients, RT reports.
Trump also tweeted Wednesday night that there are “great reporters” he respects. However, he did not name any of those journalists, unlike the treatment dished out to the “Fake News” awardees.
A blog titled “The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards” on the official Republican Party website shows the top winner of Trump’s fake news accolades to be New York Times columinist and economist Paul Krugman, who claimed on Election Day 2016 that the “economy would never recover” from Trump’s “historic, landslide victory,” according to a copy of the GOP blog archived by the nonprofit Internet Archive.
Second place went to ABC News reporter Brian Ross, whose reporting cited an anonymous source claiming that an associate of Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn was going to testify that Trump “directed him to make contact with the Russians” as a candidate. However, Ross corrected that report to say that Trump was president-elect at the time, but not before causing a crash in the stock market.
In third place was CNN. Without mentioning CNN reporter Manu Raju by name, the award refers to a false report that Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., received advanced exclusive access to documents published by Wikileaks via email. Raju corrected the story when it was discovered that his anonymous source got the date of the email wrong, but not before several other news networks made the exact same error, also citing anonymous sources.
The so-called awards went on to list seven other incorrect stories about Trump that were later corrected, from the reports of Trump removing a Martin Luther King, Jr. bust from the Oval Office, to Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda not shaking Trump's hand to a report of the Trump administration hiding a climate change report.