Staff Reports
MS NOW ran a sloppy on-air claim that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was left on a “decoy” plane after President Donald Trump was moved to a separate aircraft during the Turkey trip — and a New York Times reporter corrected them live. The episode has become a fresh example of why media accuracy matters, especially when the story involves presidential security and people’s reputations.
What happened on the show
On a weekend segment of Connect with Jacob Soboroff, the program ran a graphic and commentary implying Karoline Leavitt had been left behind on the legacy 747 when President Donald Trump was quietly transferred to a different plane. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman interrupted the segment to say plainly that Leavitt “was not on the trip” and that the press person on that flight was someone else. Fact-check threads and the White House backed up Haberman’s correction. In short: the graphic on MS NOW was wrong, and a guest had to fix it live on air.
Why this mistake matters
This wasn’t a tiny typo. The underlying story involved a secretive plane swap used for presidential security. Reporting about who was on which plane feeds real questions about whether the press pool and staff were used as a “decoy” — and it can damage careers if names are tossed around without proof. When a cable network labels a staffer as “left on the decoy plane,” that claim sticks online. Networks that treat graphics as facts are letting sloppiness do lasting harm.
Network responsibility and the missing correction
Critics — including conservative media-watch outlets and people on the right — have loudly called for MS NOW to issue a formal correction. The host, Jacob Soboroff, had a guest correct him in real time, but the broader problem is that the network didn’t post a visible on-air retraction or PR correction to clear the record for viewers who missed the live fix. If you make a big claim on television, you fix it with equal prominence. No half-measures, no buried tweets.
Call it media malpractice or call it carelessness, but the remedy is the same: own the mistake, apologize, and don’t let sloppy graphics stand as headlines. The public expects a baseline of competence from big networks. If MS NOW wants to be taken seriously on national-security stories — and on anything involving the president and his team — it should start by treating facts like facts, not guesswork dressed in a lower-third. An apology and a clear correction would do more to rebuild trust than another week of pundit pontificating.
