Trump team's newest misinformation blitz goes unchecked by big media
On the Sunday political talk shows, officials take credit for a Biden win and threaten alliances that build jobs.
When Trump’s team takes to the political TV talk shows, it always leaves a disastrous mess of misinformation in its wake. Sadly, the media helps by failing to correct or even challenge many of the plainly false statements. This failure has serious and immediate repercussions. The national and global economies hang in the balance.
Every crazy new thing Trump and his team say or do can lead business owners, investors, state governments, and nations all over the world to make decisions. They need to know what’s true. They can’t count on Team Trump for that, but they should be able to count on the media.
Recently on my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news media, I focused on two of the five big Sunday political talk shows.
So this week, I turned to the other three. Each was filled with more misstatements and unverified claims than I could get through in one column. Here are some of the most concerning ones.
On CNN’s State of the Union, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett made a stunning statement about the majority of the world’s nations. The message of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, he said, was, “‘If you come to the table and negotiate us -- with us and treat us the same way we treat you, then we will get your rate really low.’ So, right now, 130 countries have responded, and we're negotiating with them, and they have got their rate down to 10 percent.”
Is that true? You might hope the news show would ask for some sort of list or proof. You’d be disappointed. (Last week, when the administration floated a figure of over 75 countries, NBC reported that the White House refused to release a list.) Nevertheless, it took no time for news headlines to pick up on the 130 figure Sunday as though it’s somehow trustworthy.
Even the White House itself did not include this figure in its list of favorite quotes from the Sunday shows. (Reaching anyone at this White House is nearly impossible, but I attempted to email Hassett at a non-governmental email address I found for him.)
Over on ABC’s This Week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick denied reality about a red state. Attempting to claim that Trump is great for American manufacturing, he said the Japanese company Panasonic “built an amazing factory in Kansas, which they're opening now. They put it in the ground when Donald Trump was the president, and [they’re] just finishing now.”
No. Kansas won the Panasonic contract for an electric vehicle battery plant in 2022, when Joe Biden was president. His signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, helped incentivize Panasonic’s decision, according to analysts. Then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited and spoke at the site. It was part of a trend: Biden’s term far outpaced Trump’s first term in creating manufacturing jobs, an analysis found.
There are concerns about the project’s future under Trump. “The paradox is that one of the reddest states in America has placed such a sizable bet on a green technology at the dawn of one of the most conservative administrations in decades, led by a president who has no love for EVs and scoffs at the threat of the climate change they address,” the nonprofit Flatland reported earlier this year. Trump’s threats to end EV subsidies could slow the market.
Lutnick also claimed that U.S. farmers “are going to finally have access to the world's markets.” In reality, last year “the U.S. exported $176 billion in agricultural products to a total of 189 countries and territories,” according to the Farm Bureau. (I emailed the Commerce Department, and, of course, do not expect to hear back.)
Given that it’s part of Fox News, Fox News Sunday shouldn’t even be expected to challenge claims in favor of Trump. Still, since the show airs on broadcast channels, it might reach people who don’t usually tune to the cable channel. And that's where Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins carried out her obfuscation duties. For example, she repeated the Trump administration’s claim that Japan allegedly has a “700 percent tariff on our rice.”
If the media bothered to fact check this, they’d find what the Japan Times has explained. The country imports 770,000 metric tons of rice each year without any tariffs -- and the latest figures show 350,000 tons imported tariff-free from the United States in 2023. Additional rice faces a tariff of $2.30 per kilogram. Japan’s agriculture minister has called the 700% claim “incomprehensible.”
Will Japan keep taking in so much rice tariff-free from U.S. producers if this is how the president is treating the country? For that matter, does Trump think Japanese companies like Panasonic will keep investing in new U.S. facilities? False and misleading attacks do nothing to open markets or woo businesses.
When Americans hear claims like these, they can easily be left with the idea that Trump knows what he’s doing and is seeing results. This is why it’s so important to challenge and fact check on the spot. Platforming liars for live broadcast interviews makes it virtually guaranteed that falsehoods will go uncorrected. No one but the Trump administration itself is served by that.
Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.
Thanks for publishing this, The Contrarian. The media's failure to provide truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is damaging our society and empowering anti-democratic forces. Fact checks: https://theystandcorrected.substack.com/
This is why I no longer watch the Sunday shows. Thanks for the article.