NBC News screwed up in a big way Thursday when it reported the Justice Department had “wiretapped” President Trump’s personal lawyer.
The DOJ has done no such thing.
Rather, federal officials logged outgoing and incoming numbers to Michael Cohen’s phones via a machine called a pen register. As NBC had to clarify in an updated version of its original story: “[A] pen register … records the number of the phone that made the call and the number that received it, but does not record the contents of any conversation.”
This is vastly different from law enforcement agents actually eavesdropping on Cohen’s conversations, as the word “wiretap” suggests.
NBC’s original headline read, “Feds tapped Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s phones.” It has since been changed to the more factual, “Feds monitored Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s phones.”
But this is much worse than just a terribly misleading headline. The initial NBC report also included these lines: “Federal investigators have wiretapped the phone lines of Michael Cohen … It is not clear how long the wiretap has been authorized … At least one phone call between a phone line associated with Cohen and the White House was intercepted.”
The most shocking allegations in the original story came from two anonymous sources. Perhaps they were not as well-placed as they led NBC News to believe.
The amended article also carries a rather lengthy editor’s note, which reads:
However, by the time the truth of the matter came out Thursday evening, NBC’s bogus allegation had already ricocheted around the world, appearing everywhere in news headlines and media reports.
“Federal investigators tapped Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s phone,” read a Vox.com headline.
The Daily Beast went with this: “Report: Feds Wiretapped Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen’s Phones.”
“Trump attorney Michael Cohen wiretapped, feds White House call,” reads USA Today’s headline.
CNN even ran a headline Thursday afternoon titled, “Sanders can’t ‘verify the validity’ of NBC report Michael Cohen was wiretapped.”
Most of these articles have been corrected to reflect that NBC misled everyone with a spectacular mistake. But good luck un-ringing this bell. Even with the eventual corrections, the original claim is the thing that sticks. In the age of lightning-fast social media, and at a time when actual fake news spreads faster and farther than ever before, attempts to correct the record are a bit like spitting in the wind.
Some portion of this Cohen “wiretap” story will stick with us for a very, very long time, hanging in the odd corners of the Internet, waiting to resurface at any given moment. Just you watch.
