BRIAN STELTER: This is what happens when the president gets his morning briefing from a conservative entertainment talk show, a show that prizes liberal bashing, pro-Trump messaging as opposed to one from a reliable news source. This is a mistake that Fox made at 6:12 a.m. and then half an hour later the president tweeted about it. We haven't heard from Fox. I've been asking Fox if they're going to correct this error, because pretty clearly a couple of errors on the air. At one point the anchor said, “this new report accuses Comey of putting our national security at risk,” and then of course the report also falsely said there was top secret info. Top secret, as you both know, is an actual defined term in the U.S. Government. No one is saying these memos had top secret information. Anyway, bottom line is that this is what happens when the president selectively, conveniently hears things on Fox that he then shares with his millions of Twitter followers, creates a news cycle, gets his fans angry at Comey and conveniently distracts from what I would argue is the more important story of the day, the story you led the hour with about Donald Trump Jr. and Manafort and Kushner. You might wonder if it's all strategic, if it's an attempt to create a counter-narrative or if it's just convenient. Either way, it goes to show how the conservative pro-Trump news universe works.
PAMELA BROWN (HOST): Well, and it's interesting Brian, because there's a pattern here. I'm thinking of examples in my head. I remember at one of his rallies when he brought up that there was growing violence in Sweden, and he was basing that if you'll recall, on a Fox News report that he had seen. That's because we were all asking, well, where is he getting that information? So this is not the first time that he's taken something from Fox News without verifying it and put it out there to the masses.
STELTER: You know, you'd wonder what would happen if he had someone working with him on his tweets ahead of time to fact check them. Because if they pulled up the article from The Hill, that reporting comes from an outlet that has a sketchy track record, sometimes very reliable, other times not so reliable, but it is a news outlet. You could have gone and read the article, checked the facts and then, maybe before publishing his tweet, corrected the tweet. But of course, that doesn't happen. The president impulsively shares something, in this case, based on a series of mistakes that were made on Fox News. Will the show correct it? We'll see about that. Will the president correct it? We'll see about that. I'm curious to see if it comes up in the White House briefing this afternoon. It's an off-camera briefing. We won't see it happen, but we can hear it later. Let's find out if the White House wants to walk this one back, because obviously his tweet was based on false information.
