Update, 11:25 a.m. Eastern: Upon reviewing CNN’s on-air coverage of Trump’s Colorado rally at the center of these false claims, the network actually aired live the entirety of Trump’s comments on Sunday about voting in the Centennial State.
Somehow, the CNN Politics team still published the butchered and erroneous Trump quote. I’ve provided video below of Trump’s full comments that CNN’s reporters didn’t appear initially interested in following. The headline has also been changed to include the acknowledgement that this blog has been updated.
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On Sunday night, Justin Baragona at Mediaite caught CNN red-handed nine days before the election in the highly unprofessional act of fabricating claims that Donald Trump told a Colorado rally that they should vote repeatedly on Election Day.
With time ticking away and the original story retweeted from @CNNPolitics over 900 times, Mediaite successfully shamed them into only a measly correction and deleting the original tweet with the false headline over two hours later.
Baragona explained that CNN originally told readers on its website that Trump had been “encourag[ing] voting more than once if necessary” and a further illustration of him “not letting up on his claims that the election could be rigged against him.”
Here’s what CNN claimed Trump stated in the original CNN Politics story: “If you go to university center, they’ll give you a new ballot, they’ll void your old ballot, in some places they do that four or five times, so by tomorrow, almost everyone will have their new ballots in.”
As Baragona quickly revealed, here’s what Trump actually said (as he also provided a video from the rally in question):
If you go to university center, they’ll give you a new ballot, they’ll void your old ballot. They’ll give you a new ballot, and you can go out and make sure it get’s in. Now in some places, they do that four or five times, but we don’t do that. So by tomorrow, almost everyone will have their new ballots in.
Needless to say, CNN had some explaining to do and upon being caught, they changed the story to read the following:
“They’ll give you a ballot, a new ballot. They’ll void your old ballot, they will give you a new ballot. And you can go out and make sure it gets in,” Trump said.
Registered voters in Colorado automatically receive a ballot in the mail, but can request a new ballot or vote in person if they have not yet mailed in a completed ballot.
“In some places they probably do that four or five times. We don’t do that. But that’s great,” Trump said Sunday, appearing to hint at the possibility of voter fraud in Colorado, a rare prospect Trump has continued to hammer on the stump.
Initially, the article by Jeremy Diamond, Ashley Killough, and Caroline Kenny was updated and the headline changed to read “Trump stokes skepticism of Colorado voting system” with no acknowledgment of the error until around 9:00 p.m. Eastern when the title was altered.
CNN finally added a correction at 9:36 p.m. Eastern that ruled “[t]his story and headline have been corrected to accurately reflect Donald Trump’s statement about mail-in balloting in Colorado.”
Ironically, CNN senior media correspondent and Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter offered an admirable and timely essay on the dangers of sharing articles from fake news sites (no matter how legitimate they appear) but as of this writing, he had yet to offer a single tweet about or reacting to his network’s egregious error.
