Today will not go into the annals of "Great Days in Journalism History." It's a day of shame for much of the left-stream media, which proved that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts on its boots.
The day started with Josh Brown, a commentator on CNBC, spinning a big fib in a Tweet to his 721,000 followers about how the newly crowned NBA champion Golden State Warriors had unanimously decided to boycott the Trump White House, "per reports."
That razor-thin snippet was all the verification left-stream writers needed to justify stories they hoped would embarrass President Trump. Media frenzy ensued and reporters from the West Coast to London repeated Brown's claim, per reports. Within a matter of hours, the search term "Warriors to boycott White House" had accumulated 652,000 internet entries!
Among those who ran free and wild with this dubious "news" are: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s JuliaKate Culpepper, The Root's Stephen Cockrell, Jen Hayden of The Daily Kos, Patrick May of The Mercury News, The Sporting News, The Daily Mail, the Washington Post, Ryan Bort of Newsweek, NBC Sports, the Kansas City Star, Madeline Kenney of the Chicago Sun-Times, BET and many more.
News One's Angela Bronner Helm deserves special mention for her ingenuity. From Brown's Tweet, she extrapolated the story as "the Kaepernick Effect."
Since Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers took a stand during the 2015 NFL season, many athletes are being more vocal in their political opinions. And the same is true of the Golden State Warriors, who, according to various reports, are not coming to Donald Trump‘s White House, as is customary for teams after winning the NBA title.
The New York Daily News came out swinging as hard as anyone with: " Rejected! The Golden State Warriors are reportedly not sticking to sports. According to CNBC's Josh Brown, the NBA champs have unanimously declined an invitation to President Donald Trump's White House, which should come as no surprise to those who have followed the left-leaning franchise the last few months."
The charade also drew in Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, whose Tweet invited the champs to visit the U.S. capitol.
Eventually the Golden State Warriors issued a news release refuting Brown, stating the president had not yet issued an invitation to the team to visit the White House.
By early afternoon, Forbes' Jerry Barca had dug around and posted a story about how Jason McIntyre of The Big Lead had pressed Brown to fess up: "I have no idea if it's true, hence 'per reports.'"
Barca wrote: "Turns out, Brown posted the boycott news based on a tweet from an unverified Twitter account of Mike Sington, whose bio on the social media platform describes him as a retired director of operations at Universal Studios and the world's top celebrity expert":
Several media posted updates correcting the falsehood. As of this post, some had not done so yet.
The gem of the day came from a blog called, ironically, A Shred of Truth, which reported the Warriors "unanimously decided not to accept congratulations from President Donald Trump." This was the smallest shred of truth in history!
This day of hysteria oddly enough followed Monday's visit to the Trump White House by the Clemson University national championship football team. With deference to Dickens: in a tale of two champions, it was the most political and the least political of times. While media recklessly rushed headlong into falsehood in hopes of politicizing the Warriors, The Bleacher Report and The Sporting News were among many media that played the Clemson celebration straight down the line without malice to the Republican president. The egg-dripping lib media badly needed this positive to salve its already tarnished reputation for reporting fake news.
