Trump-Putin Fake News Reporter Was on AP ‘Misinformation Team’

A dominant media ‘fact-checking expert’ gets long overdue comeuppance.

The Associated Press recently retracted a fake news article that claimed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had said President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were “good friends.” The reporter who wrote the piece was a featured member of the wire service’s first official “misinformation team” in 2019. “The Associated Press has withdrawn its story,” the AP announced in a March 17 statement. “Gabbard was talking about Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

That’s kind of a big mistake. Not only did a reporter get basic facts wildly wrong, but no editor involved in the article’s publication took the time to double-check what would have been a statement of major international importance had a leading member of the Trump administration actually made it.

How does it happen? Such blundering is inevitable given a “journalism” climate in which those who “report” the news come packed to the gills with rigidly partisan preconceptions.

This wasn’t a rookie error. David Klepper, the AP reporter involved, has been with the wire service since 2011. He served as “Rhode Island Statehouse Reporter” for three years before becoming “New York Capitol Correspondent” from 2014 to 2019, his LinkedIn profile states. Experience shouldn’t be an issue. His actual duties at the AP from 2019 through the summer of 2024, however, surely are.

They Call It Journalism

“AP launches ‘misinformation team’ to expose false info,” the news outlet crowed in November 2019. Klepper served on the Associated Press’ “Technology, Misinformation and Extremism” group for five years. He was a key part of the “AP’s first misinformation beat team focusing on explaining falsehoods, propaganda and conspiracy theories while exposing the creators of this material and their techniques for dissemination.” So, “explaining” the news instead of just reporting it? What could go wrong?

“As a misinformation reporter, David covers the nexus of extremism, disinformation and technology,” a 2022 AP announcement of additions to its Washington Bureau read. “He has written extensively about the impact misinformation has had on elections around the world, including the US; the Ukraine war; the COVID-19 pandemic and more and frequently breaks news about Facebook, Twitter and other technology companies.”

In his work, Klepper has routinely revealed a distinctly partisan animus. He specifically did so with Gabbard, the official whose quote he so twisted. Here’s part of Klepper’s original Gabbard-Trump-Modi article that the AP deleted from its “corrected version”:

“Gabbard, who oversees the nation’s intelligence services, has in the past echoed Russian propaganda about the war and expressed sympathy for Russia.” It wasn’t the first time he wrote in that vein. Klepper utilized the same loaded prose against Gabbard in his Feb. 12 “reporting” on her DNI confirmation by the US Senate, and the AP has not retracted it.

Keep in mind, these aren’t opinion columns he’s penning. His articles are presented as straight news from the Associated Press.

Fact Check: AP Fact Checks Aren’t Factual

In August 2020, Klepper co-authored an AP Fact Check that decreed it a matter of unassailable truth that leftist Antifa radicals were being “falsely accused” of engaging in acts of violence at Black Lives Matter street protests. This “hollow claim” was largely the nefarious work of “white supremacy groups that were promoting some of those falsehoods online,” the AP proclaimed.

Klepper’s Jan. 6 “coverage” was even more over the top. This is what the Associated Press calls news writing: “By excusing former President Donald Trump of responsibility, minimizing the mob’s violence and casting the rioters as martyrs, falsehoods about the insurrection aim to deflect blame for Jan. 6 while sustaining Trump’s unfounded claims about the free and fair election in 2020 that he lost.”

Klepper wrote that as part of a January 2022 “news” piece that could be described as a frothing screed.

And here’s Klepper on Elon Musk in May 2023, shortly after the billionaire bought the platform now known as X:

“Musk has laid off much of the staff at Twitter dedicated to ferreting out misinformation and toxic content and has since emerged as a source of misinformation himself. A new Twitter feature called ‘community notes’ was created to allow users to add context or fact check claims themselves. But no community notes were attached to Musk’s own Tweets about the gunman as of Wednesday.”

It’s hard to act like you don’t have an ax to grind when you are chopping up your beat like that.

This is how such an egregious error as the Gabbard quote fiasco comes about. When the “news” is treated as a vehicle for a prefabricated agenda, it is only a matter of time before elementary facts are grotesquely mishandled along the way. After all, they’re just ingredients to be sliced and diced in the creation of a greater dish that is meant to do anything but truly inform the reader.