This week, ABC News published a story sounding an alarm about the potential for Iranian drones to attack parts of California (a Babylon Bee story hilariously said the Ayatollah called off the attacks after noticing that Gavin Newsom already destroyed the state).
The first post from ABC News is still up:
BREAKING: The FBI has warned police departments in California that Iran wants to retaliate for American attacks by launching offensive drones against the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by @ABC News.
— ABC News (@ABC) March 11, 2026
Read more: https://t.co/LNR2dkGK8T pic.twitter.com/gMwi9Xbtyc
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted the above spin and listed what ABC didn't seem to think was important enough to include in their story:
This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people.
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 12, 2026
They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip. The email even… https://t.co/jKey9ahsNk
A community note on X added this: "ABC presented the text of the alert sent to law enforcement agencies as a verbatim quote, but the story removed the word 'unverified' from the quoted text."
Ah, "journalism!
Now ABC has provided an update:
UPDATE: The FBI has posted a fuller version of its alert to California authorities, which includes that the information was unverified. The latest version of this story has been updated with the full statement.https://t.co/JmElj1xjxI https://t.co/B8KJXuUmWQ
— ABC News (@ABC) March 12, 2026
Leavitt thanked ABC News for the update, BUT...
Thank you to ABC News for issuing a correction to this story.
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 13, 2026
The problem? Their original, misleading story received 10M views and panicked people across the country.
The correction only has 100K views.
Fake News is real and it is dangerous.
The Trump White House is… https://t.co/LLffikNaae
That's the standard pattern. The correction gets a fraction of the attention that the original "fake news" does, and the MSM knows it. The fact that this happens repeatedly means these aren't "mistakes" (and those "mistakes" always only fall in one direction).
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