When the Associated Press took some cherry-picked e-mails from then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's State Department record, they created a false picture of buying "access" through donations to the charitable Clinton Foundation. Worse still, they were feeding off of information provided by the far-right group Judicial Watch, which has been smearing the Clintons for literally decades.
At the same time that AP ran with the story, which they clearly manipulated to fit an ongoing narrative, they tweeted, "more than of those who met with Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to the Clinton Foundation," a statement that was quickly debunked. Yesterday, when CNN's Brian Stelter asked AP's executive editor Kathleen Carroll about the tweet, she said it "could have used some more precision," finally admitting that it was "sloppy." Stelter then asked her whether AP would take it down or correct it since it was false, Carroll replied,
"Well, you know maybe going forward we would need to work more on our precision on the tweets."Translation from weaselspeak: Well, you know, we won't address the false tweet. But next time, as far as the false narrative we wanted to build, we will be more precise in tweeting our bullsh*t. After all, there's an election to cover and we want to make it as close as possible. (Oops, I hope I didn't say that last part out loud!)
