On Sunday, multiple outlets reported that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, visited Iraq to get firsthand reports from U.S. commanders on the progress of the battle against the Islamic State. Among the news organizations that covered the story was Reuters, which published their version online on Sunday, but then suddenly retracted the story around 3 a.m. Monday morning, issuing an “advisory” saying the story was “wrong” and “withdrawn.”
Was it fake news? Well, not exactly. Reuters published a “substitute story,” which is similar but with some revisions; however, the news agency’s handling of the retraction/non-retraction raised some eyebrows.
Tracking the convoluted tale of Reuters’ Kushner report takes a little help from the Wayback Machine, which Gizmodo helpfully checked out to provide a timeline. The crux of the issue appears to be that Reuters initially wrongly reported that Kushner arrived in Iraq “over the weekend” and that an anonymous White House official was the source of the information. A revised version of the story partly addressed the mistake, explaining, “Although media reported on Sunday that Kushner and Dunford were in Iraq over the weekend, they only arrived on Monday afternoon” (a line that was later deleted, by the way).
The process of getting from the initial report to the now more factually sound “substitute story” was rather “weird,” as Gizmodo puts it. After posting the first story late Sunday, a few hours later, around 3 a.m. Monday morning, Reuters posted and tweeted the “advisory” retraction, saying simply:
“The story “Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner visits Iraq, U.S. official says”, the accompanying alert and subsequent update are wrong and were withdrawn.
But a few hours later, the news agency deleted the retraction and published a new version of the story at a new URL, which initially went up around 7:30 a.m.
The saga wasn’t over yet though. Around 9:30 am, Reuters revised the new story, which was given a similar title to the original, though the reference to “U.S. official” was dropped, reading simply, “Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner, flies into Iraq with top U.S. general.”
Soon after finalizing(?) the official substitute, Reuters linked to that new story under the “advisory” warning at the URL of the retracted story. Yeah, “weird.”
Here are the first four paragraphs of the new and improved story, which clearly states that Kushner arrived on Monday and underscores the real point of the piece: Kushner is very important in the Trump administration, and the battle in Iraq is heating up:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, flew into Iraq on Monday with the top U.S. military officer to get a first-hand assessment of the battle against Islamic State from U.S. commanders on the ground and to meet Iraqi officials.
For Kushner, who has not been to Iraq before, the trip comes at a critical time as Trump examines ways to accelerate a U.S.-led coalition campaign that U.S. and Iraqi officials say has so far been largely successful in uprooting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
The visit appears to demonstrate the far-reaching portfolio of Kushner, 36, who is part of Trump’s innermost circle and who has been given a wide range of domestic and foreign policy responsibilities, including working on a Middle East peace deal.
Marine General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he invited Kushner and Tom Bossert, White House homeland security adviser, to accompany him so they could hear “first-hand and unfiltered” from military advisers about the situation on the ground and interact with U.S. forces.