President-elect Donald Trump tweeted a false claim Thursday night about saving a Kentucky Ford plant from moving to Mexico. By the next day, a handful of reputable news agencies had blasted out credulous headlines that bolstered that falsehood.
“Just got a call from my friend Bill Ford, Chairman of Ford, who advised me that he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky – no Mexico,” Trump tweeted. “I worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. I owed it to the great State of Kentucky for their confidence in me!”
Not so: Ford Motor Company operates two plants in the state, neither of which had planned on moving to Mexico. On Thursday night, Ford announced that one of its plants in the Bluegrass State, the Louisville Assembly Plant, would continue manufacturing the Lincoln MKC, the production of which they had previously considered moving to Mexico.
Even if production of that one model had moved to Mexico, the Louisville plant would not have lost any jobs, according to a statement from the company last November. Employees at the Louisville plant would have simply shifted to producing more Ford Escapes.
Many news outlets reprinted Trump’s claim Thursday night, and some continued to propagate it Friday morning.
Reuters:
How lies spread: Reuters initially had a headline just reprinting Trump’s made-up story. pic.twitter.com/a0RN13uNHe
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 18, 2016
Washington Examiner:
Forget “fake news.” Trump got some credulous real-website headlines for making something up: pic.twitter.com/WEfbfONhab
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 18, 2016
Bloomberg:
bloomberg runs fake news story based on false trump tweet pic.twitter.com/AF0N0M8UiR
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 18, 2016
Wall Street Journal:
wall street journal joins fake news brigade, writes story based on totally false trump tweet pic.twitter.com/qwZrGMAMbK
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 18, 2016
The Louisville Courier-Journal:
The New York Times and National Public Radio, on the other hand, provided a model for appropriately skeptical headlines.
NPR: