Joe Concha slams WaPo error: Another misleading story 'gobbled up' by anti-Trump media
Post wrongly attributed multiple remarks to Trump from phone call with Georgia election official
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Washington Post misquoting of former President Trump shows that the media will do whatever it takes to push an agenda against the 45th president, Fox News contributor Joe Concha said on Tuesday.
"It's a political operative that had an agenda. It's kind of like, you know, you go to the beach and you throw up food to seagulls and the seagull doesn't really check what the food is exactly. They just eat it up. They gobble up. And that's what happens with the media," Concha told "Fox & Friends."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Washington Post made a massive correction Monday to a January report about a phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson, admitting it wrongly attributed multiple quotes to Trump based on an anonymous source.
The Post initially reported Trump had told an official working in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office to "find the fraud" in the state, which he lost narrowly to Joe Biden, and that she would be a "national hero" if she did.
However, a newly emerged recording of the Dec. 23 call found he didn't use those words. Instead, Trump said she would be "praised" when the "right answer comes out" and encouraged her to closely examine mail-in ballots in Fulton County, the heavily blue and most populated county in the state.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Post published a lengthy correction to its story: "Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to "find the fraud" or say she would be "a national hero" if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find "dishonesty" there. He also told her that she had "the most important job in the country right now." A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump."
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Concha said that during the Trump era, there were unnamed source stories that only "seemed to go in one negative direction towards the president."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Here's the bottom line: in these situations, the allegation gets 1,000 times the play - remember how much coverage this particular story got - then the exoneration," Concha said.
Concha went on to say, "And then the best part is other news organizations confirm the story with sources, which is the same horrible source that fed the information in the first place."
Fox News' David Rutz contributed to this report.