MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, falsely reported over the weekend that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was on the return plane from Turkey last month that President Donald Trump was secretly moved off.
The network’s Jacob Soboroff said that Leavitt was among the officials who remained on the legacy plane with reporters for the flight from Ankara to Mildenhall Air Force Base after Trump was shuttled in a catering truck to an Air Force C-32A before takeoff. But Leavitt was not even on the trip.
“Tell us about the people that he brought with him in the catering truck to the plane and why them and not all these other folks like Marco Rubio, or Stephen Miller, or Karoline Leavitt,” Soboroff said on the show, Connect with Jacob Soboroff.
The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, who was a guest on the show, corrected Soboroff in real time.
“Well, Karoline Leavitt, by the way, wasn’t on this trip. It’s actually important. There’s like a huge internet rumor that she was there, and that’s why she’s leaving. She was not on the trip, so just for anybody who’s still asking about that, it was Steven Cheung who was the press person there,” Haberman said.
However, the network pressed forward with an incorrect graphic stating that Leavitt was “LEFT ON THE DECOY PLANE.”
Soboroff and MS NOW are facing criticism after the network failed to put out a statement correcting the false reporting.
“More Fake News from MS Now and the libs online,” Leavitt wrote in a post on X.
NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck ripped the network in a post on X.
“This weekend, MS NOW aired a completely incorrect graphic saying Karoline Leavitt was on plane on way back from NATO trip,” he wrote.
“Notice NYT’s Maggie Haberman corrected Jacob Soboroff live on air, but MS NOW won’t put out a tweet apologizing for the error from their PR account,” he added.
Deputy Assistant to the President and Press Adviser Pat Adams blasted MS NOW as well.
“MS Now is such a sloppy and biased media organization that the reporter they booked as a guest for their segment (Maggie Haberman) had to fact-check the host of their show (Jacob Soboroff) about his completely incorrect graphic live on air,” he wrote.
