The story described Muhammad’s statements when she took the stage at a conference last week and answered a question about the “travel ban” by saying that she had been personally “held at Customs for two hours just a few weeks ago.” The athlete is not as adept at time sense as she is at her sport, because she eventually had to clarify that “just a few weeks ago” meant “in December.” The website followed with an update, but never mind. TIME saw her statement, didn’t check the time frame or notice the update, and tweeted yesterday (remember, the story was clarified two days before, and was wrong to begin with) the headline in TIME’s “Motto.”
“Olympic athlete Ibtihaj Muhammad was detained because of President Trump’s travel ban”
The U.K.’s Independent went with a story titled, “US Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad says she was detained by Customs after Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban.’
The Hill published an article whose opening paragraph read, “A Muslim-American Olympic medalist says she was detained by Customs for nearly two hours without explanation after President Trump’s travel ban was instituted a few weeks ago.”
Sports Illustrated and ESPN also published stories implying that Muhammad’s Customs detention was triggered by Trump’s immigration order, and other journalists and pundits expressed indignation on social media.
Remember, Muhammad was detained in December of 2016. Barack Obama was President. Trump’s Executive Order was just a twinkle in his eye. Never mind, though. TIME has yet to pull down its tweet, and several of the news sources haven’t corrected the story. None of them have explained how they got it wrong, which would make them look like the hacks they are. The liberal, as in mainstream, media, hasn’t reported its own botch, either. Why? Because they don’t want the public to know how utterly untrustworthy their reporting, editing and fact-checking is, especially while they are swept up in the Left’s strategy of undermining the ability of the Trump administration to govern.
...But the fact that someone at the Republican National Committee posted a dubious Lincoln quote on the 16th President’s birthday was worthy of long, mocking articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, Huffington Post, Yahoo!, AOL, ABC, in Vox, and other sources, none of which, so far, have bothered to cover the collective media smear by false facts. Their argument, I’m sure, would be that Ibtihaj Muhammad would have been detained had she traveled “a few weeks ago,” so the story was true enough.]
