Media must be more careful when parroting Trump claims

Newsrooms chase blindly after Trump’s tweets, and reporters are left simply parroting whatever the New York businessman says. Considering the incoming president’s penchant for falsehoods, exaggerations, untruths and flat-out lies, this simply won’t do.

The latest example of an unfortunate media misstep involves newsrooms moving too quickly to repeat Trump’s boast that he was involved in Sprint’s decision to add 5,000 new jobs in the United States.

“So we just had some very good news,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “Because of what’s happening, and the spirit and the hope, I was just called by the head people at Sprint, and they are going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States.”

“They have taken them from other countries. They are bringing them back to the United States,” he added.

The problem with Trump’s post-election boast is that Sprint’s plan to create these thousands of new jobs has been in the works since at least April 2015, two months before the president-elect even launched his campaign.

Newsrooms nevertheless ran with headlines that underscored Trump’s boast, and failed to note the easily verifiable fact that the jobs plan pre-dated his bid for the White House.

Here are just a handful:

• From Fox News: “Trump announces 8,000 more jobs for American workers.”
• From CNBC: “Trump says Sprint will bring 5,000 jobs back to the U.S.; OneWeb will create 3,000 jobs.”
• From CNN: “Trump declares victory: Sprint will create 5,000 U.S. jobs.”
• From USA Today: “Trump: Sprint moving 5,000 jobs back to U.S.”

It goes on like that for quite some time.

Though it’s nice to hear about the creation of new jobs in the United States, those plans were in place long before the Trump campaign was even a thing.

It seems awfully disingenuous, then, for the president-elect to attribute the new jobs to “the spirit and the hope” of his Nov. 8 election, and it’s a mark against newsrooms for failing to note this in their headlines.