Newsweek Reporter Fired for Inaccurate Report About Trump Spending Thanksgiving “Tweeting and Golfing”
“The story has been corrected, and the journalist responsible has been terminated.”
As Legal Insurrection readers are aware, President Trump spent his Thanksgiving in Afghanistan serving Thanksgiving dinner to our troops and personally thanking them for their service to our great country.
Meanwhile, over at Newsweek, one of their reporters published an article that claimed Trump would spend Thanksgiving “tweeting and golfing.” The internet blew up over what was widely perceived as lazy/inaccurate and even biased reporting.
The president himself weighed in and as of Saturday, the writer, Jessica Kwong, has been fired from Newsweek.
The original article was, according to the editor’s note, “substantially updated and edited at 6:17 pm EST to reflect the president’s surprise trip to Afghanistan. Additional reporting by James Crowley.”
Trump headed to Afghanistan to surprise U.S. troops on Thanksgiving https://t.co/f7Xeqz1ZGQ Deleting this tweet because it was written before knowing about the president’s surprise visit to Afghanistan-an honest mistake. Story has already been updated, as shown in the screenshot. pic.twitter.com/g9CfPaV2kQ
— Jessica Kwong (@JessicaGKwong) November 29, 2019
The pushback to her nonapology apology was immediate.
It wasn’t an “honest mistake” you tried to dunk on Trump and ended up dunking on yourself because you couldn’t resist. Notice how there’s never been a story that broke in Trump’s favor & had to be corrected the other way? These aren’t mistakes, they are a very consistent pattern. https://t.co/HmyrHrOjqB
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 30, 2019
Why would you write the story without having any of the facts?
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 29, 2019
This was my exact question… the entire original story had no basis in fact and was just speculation.
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) November 29, 2019
https://twitter.com/listener_t/status/1200215452695183360
The president responded with good, if biting, humor.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1200224161576017921
Apparently, Newsweek took notice because they have since let the reporter go.
The Washington Examiner reports:
The Newsweek reporter who wrote an inaccurate story about President Trump’s Thanksgiving Day plans has been fired. The outlet’s original story claimed the president only planned on tweeting and golfing during his holiday break, neglecting to mention his trip to Afghanistan.
Newsweek’s Jessica Kwong, whose Twitter handle identifies her as a political reporter “covering Trump administration and family,” initially published the article Thursday morning, before the president’s trip to Afghanistan was announced publicly. The story’s initial headline was, “How is Trump spending Thanksgiving? Tweeting, golfing and more.”
“Newsweek investigated the failures that led to the publication of the inaccurate report that President Trump spent Thanksgiving tweeting and golfing rather than visiting troops in Afghanistan,” a Newsweek representative told the Washington Examiner. “The story has been corrected, and the journalist responsible has been terminated. We will continue to review our processes and, if required, take further action.”
The Washington Examiner updated their above story with the following:
Kwong told the Washington Examiner that she was assigned to write a story about what the president was doing on Thanksgivinga week in advance and filed it to her editors on Wednesday. Then, she explained that she sent a message to the editor on duty with the president’s latest actions and the editor published the piece. That editor decided to have a reporter write a new story on Trump’s surprise trip to Afghanistan, and neglected to update Kwong’s original piece in a timely manner.
I hate to hear of anyone losing their job, particularly during the holidays, and it seems there may be more to the story given the anti-Trump culture at progressive outlets. Why wouldn’t Kwong’s piece be immediately revised / updated or (better) pulled the second it was learned that it was false? Who made that decision and why?
The severe Trump derangement that permeates the leftstream media is bound to, and very often has, resulted in just this sort of sloppy publication of inaccurate and even of apparently fabricated nonsense. Letting one reporter go is not going to solve the deeper issues that have resulted in the public’s general distrust of the media.
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Comments
First, it’s important to remember “Newsweak” sold for a dollar, and it’s value is solely for the bullshit or pictures of racist slobs like michelle obama (wearing what must be jurassic-sediment-thick makeup, and processed by teams of Photoshop experts) that it puts on its front cover in supermarket checkout lines.
Second, the guy who was ‘fired’ will be moved laterally to some other fascist publication in the cabal. It’ll be seamless. In fact, he’ll surely get a raise for his ‘sacrifice’. Wink wink?
Third, we can write the Newsweak stories ourselves, by coming up with ‘big lies’ a la the Third Reich. Same the other garbage run by the fascist left and populated by useful idiots milled-out by corrupt leftist colleges under the guise of ‘journalism’ degrees.
Fourth: thank God for Donald Trump. Literally. And thank God every day. Then thank Trump.
In case there are any libtards lurking here, these are some “stories” you may want to “report”.
1. Trump Invites Russian Hookers on AF1: Pee Fest at 35,000 Feet
2. Trump Has Secret Meeting with Ukraine Pres: Pay for Dirt
3. Trump to Rig Voting Machines for 2020 Election
Seems as if some editor should have been fired first!
You can be sure he was rewarded.
You don’t get your Credibility back by firing one scapegoat.
‘Tweeting, Golfing and More.” She should have claimed “The AND MORE part was: Flying 32 hours round trip to Afghanistan and spending time serving US Troops Thanksgiving dinner and boosting their morale through the roof! Because I know we have the most incredible President in our lifetimes! Amirite guise???”
I always thought that a reporter, asked to report on someone’s action to be taken on a specific day in the future, would consult with that someone, or an agent or representative of that someone to find out what his plan was for that day.
In this case that obvious procedure by the reporter might have received a vague and evasive response. An intelligent reporter might assume from it that a surprise was planned.
Did she consult with someone at the White House? That was the obvious thing to do.
Had she been told by a Trump representative that he was going to play golf and relax, (to keep his trip secret,) she was fully justified in her reporting.
If that happened Newsweek could not fire her without risking a law suit it would surely lose.
Thus, she must have made something snide up out of her head instead.
This is modern reporting!
Daniel, seriously: do you think she made a ‘mistake’?
Her job is to lie.
Just a case of newsweak, the dollar value magazine, getting caught with what they do every day.
“The Newsweek reporter who wrote an inaccurate story about ….”
The NewsWeak reporter who wrote a lie…..
FIFY
One down, all of the rest to go.
#include
int main (void)
{
printf(“Jessica, learn to code.n”);
return 0;
}
The commenting system stripped out the code’s include file name and the escape character, probably for security reasons.
It strips out HTML tags, interpreting them if allowed, discarding them if not. To put a < sign in a comment, enter it as &< So: <stdio.h>
Oops. Only one ampersand. <
Why not just write what you mean, so those of us who aren’t allowed at the cool kids table know what you mean?
You mean that I *finally* got to sit at the cool kids’ table? Awesome. Bring me the Heathers. All of them.
Aw, come on, it’s not hard to understand what Dantzig93101 was getting at, even if you aren’t a programmer. The Jessica, learn to code is pretty clear and it’s a jab at one of the past few years’ social commentaries: If you lose your job to automation or downsizing or anything, don’t worry, you can be a computer programmer! It’s sarcasm, meant to drive home a point because 1) not everyone has the aptitude to think like a programmer and 2) not all the jobs are glorious and pay well and 3) _____ (fill in the blank with whatever floats your boat).
Learn to code is effective. It burns them like acid. It’s why some sites delete the comments immediately. That first started on the journalists losing their jobs for to decades they’d been squawking, ‘learn to code’ at loggers, fishermen, miners, and factory workers who lost their jobs. Now it burns when someone reminds them that the glory days of paid advocacy journalism have gone the way of the Studebaker.
And even when you might think they’re actually trying to do the right thing by firing a liar, they still lie.
“The story has been corrected, and “the journalist” responsible has been terminated.
——————–
Kwong isn’t a journalist, she’s a democrat party loyalist writing biased stories to push the democrat/socialist/communist narrative.
did the editor that approved the story also get canned?
Odd that Newsweek acted so quickly. Either this reporter has had other problems, or Newsweek is in the process of reducing staff.
If the reporter writing the inaccurate article got fired, how does the rest of the dinosaur media have jobs? Of the amount of drivel I see that goes for reporting, the vast majority is pure fallacy.
Three words left to say to Jessica Kwong.
Learn. To. Code.
Newsweek’s response reminds me of the following:
Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, 2nd Ed.
R.M. Wachter, M.D.
K.G. Shojania, M.D.
From Chapter 2: It’s the System, Stupid
The British psychologist and professor James Reason didn’t set out to study health care. His background was in aviation safety, especially looking at human factors that caused many plane crashes. Trim and good-humored, Reason had become the guru of industrial safety on both sides of the Atlantic by the late 1990s. His brilliantly argued “theory of error” was used by airlines, navies, railroads, truckers, maritime shippers, nuclear power plants, and financial service companies—just about everywhere but medicine.
Most human endeavors, he believed, could be compared to a chisel, with a sharp end that splits the wood and a blunt end that receives the hammer blows to drive it. After major accidents, people generally blame those operating at the “sharp end” of the activity: the surgeon slicing his scalpel through a patient’s skin, the pilot adjusting a plane’s rudder, the pharmacist dispensing medication, and the oil rig worker operating a massive drill. The “blunt end” of the process—managers setting priorities, supervisors preparing schedules, administrators processing forms, regulators enforcing rules—is seldom examined; usually only after a failure pattern has become so obvious that it can no longer be ignored.
Asked to write a story describing something that hadn’t yet happened? That is the very definition of fake news.
It’s reality as defined… redefined in the penumbra. Welcome to the Twilight Fringe.
News is in the narrative business, telling its audience the narrative that that audience wants to live in. It’s pretty low class to fire her for doing what she’s paid to do.
They’re protecting the narrative frame that says this is reality, is all. It’s part of the illusion that their audience wants to read.
There’s no audience for hard news. Think of city council meetings. There are two audiences
1. Soap opera fans, the left. They tune in every day and so pay the bills, news or no news, so long as there is soap opera.
2. Reports on what the left just did, the right. Feeds on digust and outrage about idiocy. They tune in every day to see how unbelievably bad the left is that day.
Which suggests that the political division of the country is actually in support of the entertainment business, called news.
The only out seems to be decoupling soap opera from politics. Say by taking away the women’s vote.
My first thought was, ‘Newsweek has paid staff?’ I thought it was like the huff-puff and just paid in feel goods.
This was not a mistake on the part of the reporter or Newsweek. The media organ was merely following the current journalistic approach of PREDICTING the news, rather than reporting it. The problem with that is that journalists are not prescient. They are not the Psychic Hotline. They are merely reporters.
Now, this trend to oraclerize journalism is not confined to any particular portion of the profession, but is now widespread. We constantly see “reporters” telling us that a given person or entity is “going to do something” in the future. Often these predictions prove to be be inaccurate or totally false.
News magazines, unlike news papers and television news, are not published daily or even minute to minute. Historically, their reporting has been in-depth analysis of news worthy events. And that was why readers read them. They gave the reader far greater depth than was usually found in daily and instant news organs.
Now, should the reporter have been fired? Of course not. This was simply a CYA attempt to salvage some kind of credibility for a news magazine which is circling the drain. The reporter did exactly what the magazine wanted her to do and they canned her for it, as though she was a rogue employee who snuck into the office in the dead of night and surreptitiously inserted the story into the publication.
Newsweek is still in business?
The writer did the wrong thing, and her employer did the right thing. Does canning one writer fix the media? Of course not, but Newsweek did the right thing this time.
And yet, these same entities add to their “Trumps Lies” list, every time he tweets or says the words “fake news”
that’s how they got their count to 12,000
Lest anyone have sympathy for Kwong, as I initially did, a quick romp through Bing demonstrates that she saw her job as smearing Trump and his family 24/7.
Epstein was murdered.
Biden, Pelosi, Kerry, Obama and Clinton are guilty of massive conspiracy of extortion and bribery and theft in the US/Ukraine foreign aid kickback plot.
Up is up. Down is down.