Fox News Conflates Trump’s Georgia Calls, Falsely Claims Corrected WaPo Story May Have Swayed Senate Runoffs – By Justin Baragona (Daily Beast) / Mar 17 2021
The story in question was originally published on Jan. 9, four days after the Georgia Senate runoff elections.
Fox News repeatedly and falsely suggested on Wednesday that the recently corrected Washington Post story about former President Donald Trump’s call with a Georgia investigator could have affected the Georgia Senate runoffs, apparently not realizing that the story was originally published four days after the election.
During Wednesday’s broadcast of the daytime panel show Outnumbered, the hosts covered Trump’s Tuesday night Fox interview with Maria Bartiromo, which featured the ex-president claiming that the story “probably affected the Senate race.” Trump’s assertion came on the heels of Bartiromo conflating the corrected report with another story on Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“I know you put out a statement about this story, Mr. President, but tell us what your reaction is that The Washington Post had to correct this fake news that they reported that you told the secretary of state of Georgia to ‘find the fraud’ and find the votes right before the Senate race,” Bartiromo said to the former president during the interview.
The truth of the matter, however, is that The Washington Post obtained the entire audio recording of Trump’s controversial call to Raffensperger on Jan. 3, two days before the election, and published a story detailing Trump’s pleas to the secretary of state to “find” over 11,000 votes to flip the state’s election results. None of the quotes in that story were ever in question as the Post sourced them directly to the call recording, which they included in full.
