Federalist senior writer Mary Katharine Ham slammed members of the media for repeatedly reporting false information about the ongoing investigation into whether Trump or his associates colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.
“The press does not understand that there is a credibility crisis on two sides here — for the president and for us,” Ham said Monday during a segment on CNN’s “The Lead With Jake Tapper.”
“Comparing our ability to get things right with a politician’s is damning with faint praise,” she continued. “Literally our only job is to tell the truth. They’re politicians and they’re very different than that.”
“I don’t think that people are purposefully making mistakes,” Ham said in reference to multiple news stories about the Russia investigation published last week and this week that turned out to be untrue. “But look at the Brian Ross story. The K.T. McFarland quote, when seen in full context, was much different than we were led to believe by The New York Times. The WikiLeaks story — these always break one way and it’s a way that makes the administration look worse. They don’t break the other way.”
“That actually does matter to people,” she said. “If you look at the most recent Poynter survey of trust in the media, one of the things that’s really important about it is how you deal with these mistakes and how you own up to them. So, I think pivoting the press on pivoting from making the mistake and saying sorry to, ‘Hey, hey, hey. Why are you attacking us?’ And getting very pompous about it, is not a great look.”
