Late on Thursday, NBC News issued a correction to a false news report they published earlier in the day which dominated the news cycle for the majority of the day.
NBC News had claimed that federal investigators had a “wiretap” on the phones belonging to President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen and that “at least one phone call between a phone line associated with Cohen and the White House was intercepted.”
That turned out to be false.
NBC News was forced to issue a retraction to their story, writing:
Earlier today, NBC News reported that there was a wiretap on the phones of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, citing two separate sources with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen.
But three senior U.S. officials now dispute that, saying that the monitoring of Cohen’s phones was limited to a log of calls, known as a pen register, not a wiretap where investigators can actually listen to calls.
NBC News has changed the headline and revised parts of the original article.
The authors of the NBC News’ report, Tom Winter and Julia Ainsley, both issued tweets stating that they had to correct their report:
To make matters even more embarrassing for NBC News, the network tried to downplay its colossal screw-up by calling their retraction an “editor’s note.”