The one thing consistently bugging me about this whole NBC News debacle surrounding the story about the President’s lack of presence among our troops is that NBC was likely well aware that publishing the story was done without all the necessary information, yet pushed forward anyway.

To catch you up, NBC News made an effort to inform the world that President Donald Trump would be the first president in years to not visit the troops on Christmas time. As it was releasing this news, Trump was actually doing the exact opposite of what NBC News claimed. Regardless, the tweet got hundreds of thousands of retweets and likes, and many in the leftist media ran with the narrative.

President Trump becomes first president since 2002 not to visit troops at Christmastime. https://t.co/6GS2MTeaLZ

— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 25, 2018

And the likelihood that they knew stems from a single tweet by CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who has been through this song and dance enough times to know how the President’s overseas visits to active battlegrounds work.

“A presidential trip to Iraq is a highly secret movement,” tweeted Knoller. “No advance notice to press other than press pool going along. Air Force One is boarded in privacy in hangar and departs under cover of darkness. All on board instructed to pull down window shades and surrender cell phones.”

A presidential trip to Iraq is a highly secret movement. No advance notice to press other than press pool going along. Air Force One is boarded in privacy in hangar and departs under cover of darkness. All on board instructed to pull down window shades and surrender cell phones.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) December 26, 2018

So Knoller knew the drill. What’s more, his news organization must have known the drill too if this was a common practice.

CBS isn’t the only presidential news veteran in the game. So is NBC, who also has its own reporters who detail the president and know the drill.

So what I’m being asked to believe without being asked at all is that NBC simply made a mistake in their reporting despite being hyper-aware of what the protocols are, as well as their reporters who cover the President’s movements did not have the same information Knoller had.

Furthermore, NBC News hardly retracted the story and played a game of technicalities in order to defend themselves for their literal fake news as the editor’s note reflects on the article itself:

On Wednesday, NBC News compiled a list of every Christmastime visit to active troops by a president since 2001. That list, as detailed in the article below, showed that former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama visited troops on or before Christmas every year since 2003, and President Donald Trump did so in 2017. As of the end of Christmas Day 2018, Trump had not visited troops during the holiday season, and had announced no plans to do so. The article was correct, but on Dec. 26, the situation changed. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, made an unannounced visit to troops in Iraq. As a result, the thrust of this article is no longer correct, even if it was at the time. In the interest of transparency, we are keeping the article on NBCNews.com so that the record will reflect the situation on the day the article was published, and are directing readers to the article about Trump’s Iraq visit here. We are also altering one line in the article, as well as the headline, to be more specific and to note that Trump was the first president since 2002 who didn’t visit military personnel on or before Christmas, rather than at Christmastime.

We make mistakes in the field of commentary and journalism all the time, but if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. NBC News seems to be content with saying “we’re wrong, but we were right at the time.”

Aside from the fact that NBC should have known better than the jump the gun like that, they are also well aware of how the internet works. Misinformation spreads like wildfire and corrections are often pushed to the wayside. The initial outrage will always overshadow a retraction, meaning that many more American still believe Trump never visited the troops at all because he’s a lowdown dirty scumbag who doesn’t care about American values, etc, etc, etc.

Without sounding too conspiratorial, this sounds like an awfully convenient narrative for a media that openly hates him. I find it hard to believe that no one at NBC, after years of covering Presidents, didn’t stop to think that perhaps the reason you haven’t heard about the President’s trip to Iraq is that, as per the usual, we weren’t supposed to hear about it. It’s a dangerous place and if people knew time, place, and method by which the leader of the free world was to arrive, then we could result in trouble.

This isn’t anything new, and I have a hard time believing NBC didn’t know that.