Trump Issues His “Fake News Awards”

The New York Times reports:

President Trump — who gleefully questioned President Barack Obama’s birthplace for years without evidence, long insisted on the guilt of the Central Park Five despite exonerating proof and claimed that millions of illegal ballots cost him the popular vote in 2016 — wanted to have a word with the American public about accuracy in reporting.

On Wednesday, after weeks of shifting deadlines, and cryptic clues, Mr. Trump released his long-promised “Fake News Awards,” an anti-media project that had alarmed advocates of press freedom and heartened his political base. “And the FAKE NEWS winners are …,” he wrote on Twitter at 8 p.m.

The message linked, at first, to a malfunctioning page on GOP.com, the Republican National Committee website. An error screen read: “The site is temporarily offline, we are working to bring it back up. Please try back later.”

When the page came back online less than an hour later, it resembled a Republican Party news release. Headlined “The Highly Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards” and attributed to “Team GOP,” it included a list of Trump administration accomplishments and jabs at news organizations presented in the form of an 11-point list.

The Washington Post reports:

The big winner — though of what it was unclear — was New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who predicted in 2016 that the stock market would be decimated by Trump’s electoral victory. That column turned out to be very wrong — the stock market has been sizzling for the past year, as Trump has repeatedly noted.

But Krugman’s errant call was both an opinion and a prediction, rather than news reporting, calling into question whether it belonged on a list intended to highlight, as Trump put it on Twitter, “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media.”

Another of his winners on Wednesday was Washington Post reporter David Weigel, who inaccurately — or “FALSELY,” in the awards’ all-caps characterization — questioned in a tweet whether Trump had drawn a so-so crowd to one of his rallies in December. Weigel deleted the tweet shortly after he learned that the photos he saw were taken some time before the rally began; he also apologized for his inaccuracy.

Read a full fact-checking of the “winners” here.