Atlantic editor admits major claim on Trump hit piece could be wrong

Atlantic magazine Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a 2019 interview with

Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen said women and people of color are few and far between when it comes to writing cover stories for his magazine. And when he got pushback on Twitter for his words, he blamed the woman journalist who published the story. The theme of the interview was about recent diversity achievements of the Atlantic, the fakest of fake news magazine in America. 

Goldberg agreed that the writers of the Atlantic print edition's most important pieces are overwhelmingly White male written and it was pointed out by Nieman Lab that of the 15 issues published that year, eleven had cover stories written by men.

Here’s what Jeffrey Goldberg said:

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going! 

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

So there's that about Goldberg.

A recent anti-Trump hit piece in the Atlantic claimed that President Trump referred to soldiers who died in World War One as "losers." The piece claimed that Trump didn't want to make the helicopter trip to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 and "he blamed the rain for the last-minute decision, saying 'the helicopter couldn't fly' and the Secret Service wouldn't drive him there."

The hit piece even claimed that he rejected the idea of the cemetery visit because his hair would get messed up in the rain "and because he didn't think it was important to honor the American war dead," Goldberg wrote, citing only anonymous [likely make-believe] sources.

After the article was published, Goldberg went on to say that there was going to be a lot more shade thrown on Trump to follow.

But people who were with the President when the remarks were allegedly made denied he ever said them. Even John Bolton, an avid Trump-hater who wrote a book about the President, said that he never heard those words and he agreed that the reason was due to the weather:

“Marine One’s crew was saying that bad visibility could make it imprudent to chopper to the cemetery. The ceiling was not too low for Marines to fly in combat, but flying POTUS was obviously something very different. If a motorcade was necessary, it could take between ninety and a hundred and twenty minutes each way, along roads that were not exactly freeways, posing an unacceptable risk that we could not get the President out of France quickly enough in case of an emergency,” Bolton wrote. 

“It was a straightforward decision to cancel the visit but very hard for a Marine like Kelly to recommend, having originally been the one to suggest Belleau Wood… Trump agreed, and it was decided that others would drive to the cemetery instead.”

Let's not pretend if Bolton heard Trump make those remarks that he would not put it in his book. In fact, he'd probably put it on the book jacket with a cartoon bubble over Trump's head stating those words.

On Sunday, Goldberg finally admitted the White House’s account that President Trump’s trip to a cemetery of fallen World War I soldiers in France in 2018 was modified due to bad weather is probably accurate.

Probably accurate.

“I’m sure all of those things are true,” Goldberg told CNN in an interview on Friday when asked to respond to evidence a story he published saying otherwise is false.

The Atlantic's major stockholder is Laurene Jobs, the billionaire heiress to the Steve Jobs fortune and the largest Biden donor for his election campaign. So even she had a dog in this race, or in this case, a 77-year-old guy whose mental capacity has declined to the level of cabbage.

Despite conceding that the cancellation due to weather might be true, Goldberg stood by his story about President Trump’s trip to the cemetery, claiming that “the public’s interest in meeting this information outweigh the ambiguities or the difficulties of anonymous sourcing” and that he will “be continuing to make that effort to move this material directly onto the record.”

When you have a story supported only by anonymous sources in contrast to denials of the story by known sources, even some who would hope it was true, you should not go ahead and print it.

But we're just a few weeks out from the election and the mud [if that's what that funny smell is] is flying.

Yet it isn't as if The Atlantic has refused to published false stories before this one. If you believe Trump would be crazy enough to make a statement that he knows would go public and destroy his reelection hopes, then nothing could convince you otherwise, even if you were there.

President Trump denied the claims by Goldberg and his anonymous sources, saying that other people on the trip such as the Secret Service and Gen. Keith Kellogg can “refute” the allegations.

“I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more. So I just think it’s a horrible, horrible thing,” he told reporters as he deplaned from Air Force One. “We made a great evening into, frankly, a very sad evening, when I see a statement like that. No animal, nobody — what animal would say such a thing?” 

Seriously, you have to be stupid to believe this story.

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