Corruption Of Fourth Estate On Full Display
Fourth Estate? Wikipedia helpfully explains:
The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues.
And Epoch Times offers a devastating example of the perhaps unprecedented degree of corruption we've witnessed over the past several years. The article explains that, for the second time in the same number of days the "venerable" AP has had to correct demonstrably false information that it has attempted to foist on news consumers:
The Associated Press deleted a tweet that pushed false information about President Donald Trump on Nov. 20, the second time in two days the wire agency has been forced to significantly amend its reporting on Trump.
The agency, also known as the AP, wrote in a post on Twitter: “Contradicting the testimony of his own ambassador, President Trump says he wanted ‘nothing’ from Ukraine and says the #ImpeechmentHearings should be brought to an end.”
But Trump was quoting from what ambassador Gordon Sondland said during testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.
“I finally called the president… I believe I just asked him an open-ended question, Mr. Chairman,” Sondland told Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “What do you want from Ukraine? I keep hearing all these different ideas and theories and this and that. What do you want?”
“It was a very short abrupt conversation, he was not in a good mood, and he just said, ‘I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing,’ something to that effect,” Sondland added.
AP issued a correction for an inexcusable bit of fake news, but offered no apology:
“An earlier tweet that didn’t make clear that President Trump was quoting from Gordon Sondland’s testimony in which he was quoting Trump has been deleted,” the agency wrote.
It did not apologize for the error.
That followed this:
The situation unfolded one day after the AP, wire agencies Reuters and AFP, and a slew of media outlets, deleted or significantly revised stories that reported a claim by a supposed expert that the Trump administration had detained 100,000 migrant children.
The media outlets took their figures from a U.N. report published Nov. 18, the author of which has since admitted the numbers are from a U.N. refugee agency report citing data from 2015.
That was during the administration of President Barack Obama.
The AP also did not apologize for circulating the number and attributing it to the Trump administration.