'Politico' Embarrassingly Hoist With Own Petard in Report on 'Disinformation' in Paul Pelosi Case

When a major story in this country breaks, whether it be on big news like a natural disaster, a real (or imagined) political scandal, a mass shooting, or another shocking violent crime that took place, information flows fast and freely on social media and in newsrooms regarding what allegedly happened.

Because we live in an insta-news world where everyone wants to know what’s going on and they want to know it NOW, sometimes what’s being relayed in real-time is information that either hasn’t yet been officially confirmed/corroborated or isn’t true at all. And while the mainstream media likes to pin anything that’s found to be disinformation on the well-known social media users who post it, oftentimes what’s actually the case is that it was the press themselves who started the disinformation chain to begin with in their own reporting.

Such was the case with the online news outlet “Politico,” which ran a finger-wagging story Monday that chastised Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), and other prominent conservatives for, among other things, “trading in disinformation” in the aftermath of the reported early morning Friday attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi at their San Francisco home (the Speaker was in Washington, D.C. at the time).

Here’s what Politico wrote (bolded emphasis added):

Former Republican President Donald Trump has so far remained silent online about the Pelosi home invasion, but his son Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a proposed “Paul Pelosi” Halloween costume featuring men’s underwear and a hammer, saying “The Internet remains undefeated.” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, embraced a false anti-LGBTQ conspiracy surrounding the attack, tweeting and then deleting a post suggesting the perpetrator was a “male nudist hippie prostitute.”

[…]

Beyond Trump Jr. and Higgins, pro-Trump commentators from Charlie Kirk to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. also weighed in online to raise questions about the investigation based on unfounded and false claims. Among those baseless claims: that a third person answered the door when police arrived at the Pelosi home, which San Francisco law enforcement has said is untrue; and that DePape was in his underwear when apprehended, a falsehood taken from a since-corrected local news report.

The problem here, of course, is – as even Politico pointed out – it was KTVU, not Republicans, who first ran with the underwear story, information they have since retracted.

And as far as the “third person” allegedly answering the door, well, that story originally came from … Politico themselves in this piece from 10/28 that they published after the SFPD held a presser led by police chief Bill Scott (bolded emphasis added):

David DePape forced his way into the home through a back entrance, Scott said. Officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were let inside by an unknown person. They discovered DePape and Pelosi struggling for a hammer, and after they instructed them to drop the weapon, Scott said, DePape took the hammer and “violently attacked” Pelosi.

As we previously reported, the SFPD clarified Sunday that there was no third person at the Pelosi residence at the time they arrived, which means that as of this writing, it’s Politico that is most guilty of all of still sharing the “disinformation” they blamed on right-wingers.

Here are screengrabs (and an archived link) in the event they ever get around to deleting/updating their incorrect story:

modern journalism is just so, so wild. pic.twitter.com/HGEAhPcasj

— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) October 31, 2022

While we pray for a smooth recovery for Paul Pelosi and that his alleged attacker gets the book thrown at him, we also pray that the editors at Politico see fit to restore the once-respectable publication to its former glory days instead of continuously embarrassing themselves with “reports” like the one they ran with on the conservative reactions to the news of the attack on Paul Pelosi.