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News Clash

Fake News: WaPo’s Bogus Government Shutdown Story Gets Fact-Checked Into Oblivion

Maybe it’s time the ‘free press’ ask questions more substantial than ‘can this story hurt the President’. It would result in fewer retractions.

It’s no secret that Jeff Bezos — current owner of the Washington Post — is a political activist with a personal ax to grind against President Trump. We see it all over the paper — not just on the editorial pages, but in the heavy anti-Trump slant of the supposedly ‘serious’ news pieces too.

It means their readers — who have been told they’re reading ‘news’ stories are only getting the stories that tell the side of the story their editors WANT the readers to know about. Stories that put Trump or the Republicans in a good light will be few and far between.

Take the Shutdown Story they were pitching, for example. Rather than describing straight down the middle that Republicans want (a) for this reason and Democrats want (b) for that reason, they are pitching sob stories about the negative impact of this shutdown, and if only Trump would fold to Pelosi’s perfectly reasonable demands, all would be right in the world again.

Except he didn’t, and so the Big Bad Shutdown began.

What horrible outcomes did WaPo warn us were coming?

Trump would be personally responsible for bad weather! No, wait, that was ‘bad weather predictions’. That’s almost as bad, though, right?

The Washington Post reported more than 10 days ago that weather forecasts were less reliable because of the ongoing government shutdown. Since then, however, evidence has mounted against that narrative.

The latest rebuke of The Post’s narrative came from AccuWeather. The weather and news site issued a correction to a story published Thursday on the reliability of weather forecasts during the government shutdown.

Can you trust weather forecasts during the shutdown? “Absolutely!,” reports AccuWeather.

“A previous version of this story that appeared on this page seemed to imply that government weather data could not be trusted during the shutdown even though the intent of our story was to point out that government data is continuing to flow through regular channels, and that our meteorological colleagues at the National Weather Service are working hard, as we are, to keep people safe and informed. And they are doing so without paychecks. This updated version of the story better communicates that idea.”

Likewise, University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass fact-checked the claim that weather forecasts were less accurate because of the government shutdown, which was precipitated by a fight over border wall funding.

“I think these claims are baseless,” Mass wrote in a blog post Monday. “I have looked at many other fields and the answer is the same: there is NO EVIDENCE that the initialization of the U.S. global model has been degraded as a result of the partial government shutdown.”
Source: DailyCaller

If these errors were simple mistakes in reporting, at least some of the inaccurate stories would skew in Trump’s favor. But they don’t. And that meta-detail by itself says more than a day’s worth of black ink on cheap newsprint ever could.

No, these folks from the Media(D) WANT a story critical of Trump, and they hope that, when their predictions turn out to be wrong — everyone has forgotten and moved on to the next daily ‘outrage’.

Funny how the Washington Post calls itself by either its full name or the abbreviation WaPo, but if you went by the quality of their reporting, you could drop that ‘t’ at the end of their name without losing any accuracy at all. Then again if we called them ‘Washington POS’, there are so many people that name could describe that maybe WaPo is just easier.

Go ahead and keep beclowning yourselves WaPo. We’ve got better things to do.

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck