CHRIS CUOMO (HOST): I submit to you that this is an example of why Trump is popping with people. That we like to hide, we like to protect the Muslims. And he saw them and now we're playing political correctness and he will not. [Up] goes the polls.

ERROL LOUIS: Yeah, well, this is what he says. And, look, there's something that we journalists and others want to do which is actually hold people accountable for the words that come out of their mouth. So, he actually sort of migrated. First he said thousands and thousands. He said it at a rally over the weekend. Now he's changed it to fairly large numbers. He starts wiggling, he starts waggling, he pulls out a piece from 15 years ago that says that there was an investigation that there were reports that something might be going on. Note, absolutely nothing definitive from the FBI, which apparently looked into this stuff. You have reports from multiple news organizations, including local news organizations that were just trying to figure out what was going on. And so Donald Trump is going to say whatever he wants to. His believers are going to believe whatever he says to a certain extent, and then the rest of us simply have to point out that what he has said is not true, that what he has said is either a gross exaggeration, a complete distortion, or an absolute fabrication.

ALISYN CAMEROTA (HOST): So, Zeke, why don't his supporters care whether or not he's fact-bound?

ZEKE MILLER: Well, the Trump supporters, and you go talk to them at rallies, they love the style. The substance they don't really care about. They like the way he talks, the way he stands up to authority, the way he stands up to us in the news media. The way he says, oh, the people in media, I like them, and people in the media I don't trust. And the thing is, at the end of the day he's tapping into that frustration with a small segment of the Republican Party in particular. You know, 33 percent of registered Republicans that are just frustrated with the way everything is in the country, whether it be every government institution, the media, the economy. And they just -- they are gravitating to his style, less so his substance. And so even these fact checks only help him in a certain sense because all it does is sort of reinforces how he's the outsider, how he's standing up to authority.

CUOMO: Because it plays to whose narrative do you want to believe.

[...]

LEWIS: Donald Trump says he saw a video. He says he saw a video about people celebrating by the thousands in New Jersey.

CUOMO: But it's not about what happened.

CAMEROTA: I think he said he saw it with his own eyes.

LEWIS: He clearly -- he said he saw it with his own eyes, he says he saw it on a video. Those are clearly not true. Ben Carson, I think, we should salute him for at least acknowledging that there was maybe a little bit of incorrect sort of assumptions that came out of what he was answering.

CAMEROTA: Except that he also snuck in the I didn't know there was an agenda behind the question. Yes, the agenda to get to the truth, Dr. Carson. That is the key.

CUOMO: That's the key. But not to his supporters, his supporters are that, you're playing a gotcha game.

CAMEROTA: Absolutely.

CUOMO: It's not enough for him to tell the truth. He's got to tell your truth. Zeke, you hear it all the time out on the hostings. This is working very well now. It is not new, but it is newly effective, which is that of course they're going to say I'm wrong. Of course they're going to say there are problems with me. They're the lefty media. How much resonance is it getting out on the hostings?

MILLER: That's in a way the undercovered story of this campaign. It's just how, the extent to which all these candidates are taking advantage of the public's frustration with the media. The way that they can score political points, and we saw it in that CNBC debate where, just after one candidate starts standing up to the moderators, every single one in series did it and they all got a lot of applause in that room. That's sort of become the narrative of this campaign. Everyone is telling their own truths to the American public, telling their supporters, their potential supporters what they want to hear and when anyone dares challenge them to say, oh you're wrong, I saw it or I read it on the Internet. That's sort of where this campaign has gone.

Previously:

ABC's George Stephanopoulos Fact-Checks Donald Trump's False Claim Thousands Of Arab-Americans Cheered In The Streets Following 9/11

Fox's Stephen Hayes Blasts Trump's False Claim That Thousands Of Muslims Celebrated 9/11

CNN's Alisyn Camerota Shuts Down Ben Carson's Complaints As “An Attack On Journalism”

Returning To Their Roots, Conservatives Take Comfort In 'Liberal Media Bias' Debate Charge