After Only 3 Months Covering Trump, 63 Percent of White House Reporters Have Been Lied To

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Politico has released its fourth annual survey of the White House press corps. Here’s an excerpt:

A full 63 percent of the press corps has been lied to by the Trump administration. It might even be as high as 88 percent. And that’s in just the first three months.

For comparison, the only other time Politico asked this question was in 2014. After six years of covering the Obama White House, 50% of the reporters said they had been lied to. That’s not exactly a result to be proud of, but I imagine that if Trump is still in office in 2022, his number will be hovering right around 99 percent.1

1The remaining one percent will be a reporter who had just been assigned to the White House beat the week before.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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