NBC reporters tweet big FAKE NEWS about Kennedy and Kavanaugh, then get egg on their faces!

An NBC reporter tweeted this earlier today about Justice Kennedy and Judge Kavanaugh:

https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1016642192616706050

That got a lot of attention. In fact you can see the tweet has over 15k shares and almost as many likes.

But it turns out not to be true! Geoff Bennett attributed it to Leigh Ann Caldwell, who also works as a reporter for NBC News. She had to retract it over four hours later:


So it went from Kennedy was in direct negotiations with Trump to Kavanaugh was just one name on a list of recommendations from Kennedy.

Wow.

Geoff Bennett, whose original tweet got so many shares, did put out a correction – twice:

https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1016706047799648257
https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1016764760052953088

As you can see, both of these tweets have gotten far fewer engagements than the original tweet. But that’s to be expected on corrections. The problem is they ran with with controversial unvetted information before they knew if wasn’t true.

I know these media outlets can’t be perfect all the time, but to suggest that an active Supreme Court justice was so invested in one person that he was in negotiations with the Trump administration to get that specific replacement before he retired – well that should have given them at least SOME pause.

So why hasn’t Bennett deleted his original fake news tweet? I give him credit for making the correction twice, but even so, he should probably delete it as it is still getting retweeted a bunch!


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