After President Trump’s “covfefe” tweet, the Media Research Center fired off indignant post after indignant post about all the coverage it got:
- Nets Spend 10 Mins on Trump Typo Tweet
- MSNBC’s Katy Tur Lost Sleep Over Trump’s Twitter Typo, Fears Nuclear War
- CNN Journalists Pretend to be Psychiatrists Overanalyzing Trump Typo
- Great Job, Humanity! ‘Covfefe’ Twitter Mentions Over 50 Times Larger Than Griffin
The author of that last post, Curtis Houck, complained: “If people aren’t going to have a serious debate about actual issues, perhaps not obsessing over dumb things like the President’s typo would give the media and their fans more credibility.”
Houck seems to have forgotten that he too obsessed over someone’s dumb typo. In fact, he devoted an entire April 21 post to it:
Folks, you can’t make this up. Typo of the year? I think so!
In a Tuesday story about a Jewish Republican Congressman responding to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s comments about Adolf Hitler and chemical weapons, The Hill’s Cristina Marcos referred to Spicer as Hitler (yes, you read that right).
Houck did eventually admit that we all make mistakes and the article was corrected 20 minutes after it first was posted.
And a June 8 post by Mike Ciandella needlessly highlighted another quickly corrected typo:
While live tweeting the Senate hearing for former FBI Director James Comey, NBC News Chief Global Correspodent accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions of telling Comey to call the Russia investigation a “matter” instead of an “investigation.” Except, Comey had been talking about former Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling him to call the Hillary Clinton email investigation a “matter.”
This tweet has since been deleted, but not before it could be screen captured for posterity.
If Trump’s “covfefe” tweet wasn’t news to the MRC, tweets from reporters that are quickly corrected shouldn’t be either. But nobody has ever claimed the MRC’s standards are equally applied to both conservatives and non-conservatives.