This Week in Fake News: False Reporting That H.R. McMaster Will be Fired

H.R. McMaster, national security adviser to the president, at the White House in Washington on March 6, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

NBC News Misreports White House Preparing for McMaster Exit

NBC News reported on March 1 in an exclusive report that the White House is making preparations to replace National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster as early as next month.

The sources for the article are described as “five people familiar with the discussions.”

The White House, however, denied that there are plans to fire McMaster and instead said President Donald Trump is pleased with his performance.

“General McMaster is not going anywhere. As the president said yesterday, in the Oval Office to a number of the people, he thinks he is doing a great job and glad he is here,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

This is not the first time that NBC News misreported on senior Trump officials.

NBC News claimed in an article published in October last year, that Vice President Mike Pence had to convince Tillerson to stay on after he was allegedly upset over a speech Trump had given to the Boy Scouts.

Tillerson strongly denied the claims saying: “I have answered that question repeatedly, for some reason it continues to be misreported.”

New York Times Wins Prestigious Award in Part on Inaccurate Reporting

The New York Times was awarded the prestigious George Polk award for its reporting on the Russia investigations.

A list of the articles that The New York Times won the award for, obtained by The Washington Times, revealed that it includes an article described as “almost entirely wrong” by former FBI Director James Comey.

Speaking under oath before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on June 8, 2017, Comey had discredited the Feb. 15 front-page story, which claimed that members of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

At the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) pressed Comey on the piece from The New York Times, asking, “Would it be fair to characterize that story as almost entirely wrong?”, to which Comey replied, “Yes.”

“All of you know this. Maybe the American people don’t,” Comey said, addressing the Senate committee. He said when it comes to reporters writing stories about classified information, “people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on.”

He said there have been many stories about the Russia investigations “that are just dead wrong.”

Major Networks Coverage of Trump 91 Percent Negative

Research by the Media Research Center shows that 91 percent of coverage of President Donald Trump by the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts in January and February were negative.

According to the research, only 9 percent of statements made about Trump in the broadcasts were positive.

The study includes all 505 evening news stories that mentioned Trump or his administration.

The research also shows that 24 percent of the broadcast time was dedicated to the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The topic received over twice the amount of airtime compared to the second most covered topic during the surveyed time period, which was the debate over immigration policy.

A previous Media Research Center analysis of the whole year of 2017 showed that 90 percent of all coverage of Trump by the major networks was negative.