A story runs. Then it changes: a detail drops, a source recants, an outlet corrects itself, or the whole thing is retracted. Every entry below is a real story, laid out in the order it actually happened — the first version, the outlet or agency that revised it, and what the record shows now. No entry here is about who's right in politics today; every one is closed enough to check.
A 9,000-word cover story built on one uncorroborated account. Five months later, the magazine that ran it retracted it in full.
First report·Rolling Stone
"A Rape on Campus"
Sabrina Rubin Erdely's cover story described a University of Virginia student, "Jackie," recounting a brutal gang rape at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party. Rolling Stone never contacted the accused men, never located the fraternity brother Jackie said orchestrated the assault, and never reached the friends she said she spoke to that night.
Editor's note admits "discrepancies," story republished unchanged
Within three weeks, other outlets' reporting had raised doubts Rolling Stone couldn't answer. The magazine added a note acknowledging "discrepancies" in Jackie's account but republished the story largely as written. A jury later found this specific republication was made with actual malice.
No evidence found to support the assault as described
After a five-month investigation, police said they could not "conclude to any substantive degree" that anything happened at Phi Kappa Psi or any other fraternity house that night — while stopping short of saying nothing happened to Jackie at all.
Retraction·Rolling Stone / Columbia Journalism School
Full retraction after independent review
Rolling Stone commissioned Columbia's journalism school to review its own reporting. The resulting report called the story "a journalistic failure that was avoidable," citing breakdowns in reporting, editing, editorial supervision, and fact-checking. Rolling Stone retracted the piece in full the night the report came out.
A federal jury found Rolling Stone, its publisher, and Erdely liable for defaming Associate Dean Nicole Eramo, whom the story cast as indifferent to Jackie's claims. Jurors found actual malice and awarded Eramo $3 million.
Five months passed between the cover story and its retraction. Millions of readers saw the first version; a much smaller number ever saw what replaced it.
NBC News wanted to show GM's pickup trucks could catch fire on impact. When the trucks didn't cooperate on camera, its investigators wired them to blow up on cue.
First report·NBC, Dateline
"Waiting to Explode?"
Dateline aired a crash test appearing to show a GM full-size pickup catching fire when struck from the side, presented as evidence the trucks' side-mounted fuel tanks were dangerously prone to igniting.
GM's own investigators found what NBC hadn't disclosed on air: remote-triggered incendiary devices mounted under the truck near the fuel tank, plus a loosely fitted gas cap, to guarantee a fire on camera. GM sued NBC for defamation and went public with the evidence.
NBC read a retraction on the air: "We deeply regret we included the inappropriate demonstration in our Dateline report. We apologize to our viewers and to General Motors." NBC agreed to reimburse GM roughly $2 million for its investigation costs.
Three producers forced out, correspondent demoted, news president resigns
An investigation NBC commissioned into itself laid the blame on three Dateline producers, who resigned; the correspondent who reported the story was demoted. NBC News president Michael Gartner resigned days later.
GM's trucks may or may not have had a real defect. What NBC broadcast as proof wasn't evidence of one: it was incendiary devices, wired under the truck by NBC's own investigators, because the crash hadn't cooperated on its own.
Anonymous officials gave reporters a story about a soldier who "fought to the death." The soldier they were describing didn't recognize herself in it.
First report·Washington Post
"She Was Fighting to the Death"
Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the Post's front page reported that Private First Class Jessica Lynch had "fought fiercely," shooting several Iraqi soldiers and continuing to fire after being shot and stabbed, until she ran out of ammunition.
Post revisits the story: competing, unconfirmed accounts
Ten weeks later, the Post published a much longer piece examining conflicting versions of what happened. Iraqi doctors said Lynch had no gunshot or stab wounds and was never in a firefight; her weapon had jammed. The paper did not fully retract its April account.
"It was false, but it didn't get knocked down until it didn't matter"
The Post's own ombudsman, Michael Getler, wrote that the fighting-to-the-death account was "the single most memorable story of the war" with "huge propaganda value" — and that it was false, but the correction came too late to carry the weight the original story had.
Aftermath·Jessica Lynch, testimony to the U.S. House Oversight Committee
"I did not shoot, not a round, nothing"
Four years later, Lynch testified to Congress that she never fired her weapon — it had jammed — and had no memory of a firefight; she was knocked unconscious when her Humvee crashed during the ambush. She said the "little girl Rambo" story built around her "was not true."
The dramatic version ran on the front page, sourced to officials who were never named. The correction ran ten weeks later at five times the length, and the fullest account only arrived from Lynch's own mouth, to Congress, four years after the war began.
The paper of record ran the case for war on its front page, sourced to anonymous officials and a defector known internally as "Curveball." None of it held up.
First report·New York Times
"U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts"
Reporters Michael Gordon and Judith Miller, citing unnamed Bush administration officials, reported Iraq was trying to acquire aluminum tubes "specially designed" for enriching uranium — published the same weekend administration officials appeared across the Sunday shows to build the public case for invasion.
Update·Secretary of State Colin Powell, UN Security Council
Powell repeats the case, built partly on "Curveball"
Powell's address to the UN — the closest thing the case for war had to a single defining moment — leaned on reporting traced to an Iraqi defector the CIA had code-named Curveball. German intelligence had already warned U.S. agencies that Curveball was unreliable.
The paper's editors published a rare institutional note admitting its Iraq coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been," citing stories — including the aluminum-tubes reporting — where information "was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged." Judith Miller left the Times a year and a half later.
No stockpiles found; tubes were most likely for rockets, not centrifuges
The U.S. government's own postwar weapons-hunting team concluded Iraq had no stockpiles or active WMD programs at the time of the invasion, and that the aluminum tubes were most likely intended for conventional rocket bodies — the reading IAEA inspectors had favored before the war started.
Aftermath·Curveball, in his first public interview
The source admits he lied
The defector behind the germ-warfare claims, known to the CIA only by the codename "Curveball," admitted he had fabricated his story to help topple Saddam Hussein, and said he was shocked it had been used to help justify a war.
Every stage of this one had a name attached to a title: senior administration official, the Secretary of State, the newspaper of record. The two corrections that mattered most had no title attached. Curveball's real name took eight years to surface, and the tubes were never what the first story said they were.
Cable news covered a runaway balloon live for two hours, certain a six-year-old was trapped inside. He was hiding in the attic the whole time.
First report·Cable news, live coverage
Boy, 6, believed trapped in a runaway balloon
A silver, saucer-shaped balloon lifted off from a Colorado backyard and drifted more than 50 miles at altitudes over a mile high. Believing 6-year-old Falcon Heene was aboard, networks carried the chase live for roughly two hours, some breaking into other programming to follow it.
The balloon landed with no one inside. Hours later, Falcon was found hiding in a box in the family's attic. Asked on live television that evening why he hadn't come out when his parents were calling for him, Falcon said: "You guys said that, um, we did this for the show" — the first public crack in the story, aired the same night almost no one caught it.
After three days of investigation, the sheriff announced the whole event had been staged: "It was a publicity stunt done with hopes of better maneuvering themselves for a reality TV show." The parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, later pleaded guilty to related charges.
Eleven years later, Colorado's governor granted both parents a full pardon, citing the disproportionate and lasting consequences of a stunt that caused no physical harm.
Millions watched the "trapped boy" version live. It took three days to confirm the hoax officially. The boy's own words, caught on camera that same night, were the first real signal — broadcast live, and still missed, because the frame around it was already set.
Officials and reporters described a war zone of murder and mass rape. The tallies that followed told a much smaller, still-terrible story.
First report·Multiple outlets, citing officials
"Rapes, beatings, murder"
In the days after the storm, New Orleans officials described dozens of murders and rapes inside the Superdome and Convention Center, including a widely repeated account of a child raped and killed. National media carried the claims largely as reported, with phone and cell networks down across the city and almost nothing independently checkable.
"Hundreds of armed gang members" inside the Superdome
Nagin told a national television audience the Superdome had descended into "an almost animalistic state," with evacuees trapped for days "watching hooligans killing people, raping people." A later congressional investigation found he had "repeated unsubstantiated rumors before the national media, creating an exaggerated image of utter lawlessness."
Correction·New Orleans Police Department, National Guard
Confirmed toll far lower than reported; no confirmed rapes
Weeks later, police and National Guard officials said the confirmed deaths across both sites totaled in the low teens — most from medical causes in a site with no power, food, or care, not violence — and that investigators had no official reports of rape at either location. "Things were not the way they appeared," a police captain said.
Nobody had to invent this one. Officials repeated rumors to reporters, reporters repeated the officials, and the loop ran for weeks inside a disaster zone with no working phones to check anything against. People trapped for days with almost no food, water, or medical care got less coverage than a massacre that never happened.
One accusation, no corroboration, and a prosecutor who told the media he was certain. It took an attorney general, a bar disciplinary panel, a judge, and finally the accuser herself to fully unwind it.
First report·Duke University / local press
Lacrosse team suspended amid rape investigation
A dancer hired for a team party, Crystal Mangum, told Durham police she had been beaten, raped, and sodomized by three men. Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong pursued the case aggressively and made dozens of public statements to media in the following weeks asserting his confidence in it, well before the evidence was in.
Retraction·North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper
"Innocent" — all charges dropped
After a 12-week independent review, Cooper's office found no DNA evidence, unreliable identification procedures, and no other witness or evidence supporting the accusation. Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three players innocent, calling Nifong a "rogue prosecutor."
A disciplinary panel found Nifong guilty on 27 of 32 ethics charges, including making false statements to the court and withholding exculpatory DNA evidence from the defense.
A judge found Nifong had knowingly lied to the court about DNA evidence and sentenced him to 24 hours in jail — a rare instance of a prosecutor facing personal consequences for conduct in a single case.
Eighteen years later, Mangum — by then serving a sentence for an unrelated manslaughter conviction — said she had fabricated the assault and apologized to the three players by name, saying "they didn't deserve that."
This one closed about as completely as one of these stories can: an attorney general's declaration of innocence, a disbarment, a night in jail, and finally the accuser's own confession. Even so, the accuser's confession didn't arrive until eighteen years after the attorney general's declaration.
CBS News ran documents about a president's military record as authentic. Amateur readers with a magnifying glass and a copy of Microsoft Word found the tell within days.
First report·CBS, 60 Minutes Wednesday
Documents raise questions about Bush's National Guard service
Dan Rather's segment, reported by producer Mary Mapes, presented memos purportedly from Bush's late squadron commander suggesting he received favorable treatment and skipped required duties in the Texas Air National Guard.
The memos look typed in Word, not on a 1970s typewriter
Within two days, readers pointed out the documents used proportional spacing and a superscript "th" — features common to Microsoft Word's default settings and essentially unavailable on typewriters from the period the memos claimed to be from.
Less than two weeks after the broadcast, CBS acknowledged it could not authenticate the memos and that running them had been a mistake, without yet fully retracting the underlying reporting.
Retraction·Independent review panel (Dick Thornburgh, Louis Boccardi)
Panel: CBS "failed to follow basic journalistic principles"
The panel CBS itself commissioned found the network had rushed the story to air without adequately authenticating its central documents. CBS fired four staffers, including Mapes, and Dan Rather left the anchor chair within months.
The panel that ended two careers was hired by CBS itself, and held the story to a standard the newsroom hadn't held itself to before airing it. The correction came from inside the building — it just came after, not before.
His first report from Iraq was accurate. Over twelve years of retelling it on television, the story slowly moved him into the aircraft that actually got hit.
First report·NBC Nightly News
"The Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky"
Williams' own contemporaneous 2003 report was accurate: his helicopter landed roughly an hour after a different Chinook, flying ahead of his group, was hit by rocket and small-arms fire. He was not aboard the aircraft that was hit.
Over years of retellings on NBC and in interviews, the story had grown: by the 2010s Williams was describing the helicopter he was riding in as the one hit and forced down. After he retold that version on air January 30, 2015, soldiers who were actually aboard the aircraft that took fire publicly disputed it. Williams apologized on air and on Facebook, attributing the error to "the fog of memory over 12 years."
NBC News president Deborah Turness announced the suspension "for making a false statement." Williams returned to the network months later in a different role, at MSNBC rather than the Nightly News anchor desk.
Nobody fed Williams a false account — he told it himself, correctly, the first time. The drift happened one retelling at a time, in front of an audience that had no way to check a war story against the record, until the two people who could check it finally did.
A garbled radio relay turned into a headline announcing a miracle. Three hours later, the miracle had to be taken back, miner by miner.
First report·Associated Press, local officials
Explosion traps 13 miners in Sago Mine, West Virginia
A predawn explosion at the Upshur County coal mine trapped 13 men behind rockfall as carbon monoxide filled the sealed area. One miner had already died in the blast; rescue crews began drilling toward the others.
A message relayed through underground stations garbled on its way to the surface. Family members overheard radio chatter on cell phones and began celebrating before any official statement; the report reached wire services and aired nationally as confirmed fact, with church bells ringing at the mine site.
Correction·International Coal Group CEO Ben Hatfield
Correction: only one miner survived
About three hours after the celebration began, mine officials confirmed the truth to families: 12 of the 13 miners had died, and only Randal McCloy Jr. survived. Hatfield said the "12 alive" report was "bad information" that "spread like wildfire" and was never an announcement the company had authorized — though officials had known internally within roughly 20 minutes that the number was wrong.
Like the Williams case, no single person lied. Hope traveled down a chain of relayed, overheard, half-caught radio calls and came out the other end as a fact, reported by wire services that had no way to independently confirm it. The truer number was sitting in the command center the whole time the celebration was happening.
A single account, publicly championed by name against specific accused men. A grand jury spent seven months on it and found none of it happened.
First report·Local and national press
Teenager found in trash bag, claims four-day abduction and gang rape
Fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley was found in Wappingers Falls, New York, with racial slurs written on her skin, and said she had been abducted and repeatedly raped by a group of white men, one of whom she said had a police badge. Advisers Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason, and Alton Maddox championed her account and publicly named specific local officials as responsible.
"Tawana made up tale, resisted investigation," grand jury concludes
After a seven-month investigation, a 170-page grand jury report found no evidence any sexual assault had occurred and concluded Brawley had not been abducted, raped, or sodomized as described.
Jury finds Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox defamed prosecutor Steven Pagones
One of the men Brawley's advisers had publicly named, prosecutor Steven Pagones, sued for defamation. A jury found Sharpton liable for seven defamatory statements, Maddox for two, and Mason for one.
Fifteen years later, Brawley has paid a fraction of the judgment
The jury ordered Brawley to pay Pagones $185,000 of the total award. By 2013 she had paid roughly one percent of it, garnished from her wages in small increments — a reminder that even a clear-cut jury verdict doesn't guarantee the record gets fully squared.
Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox named real people, by name, in public, before any investigation had run. The grand jury took seven months to say the accusation didn't hold up; the men they'd named carried it for the rest of their lives regardless of what the record eventually showed.
Five teenagers confessed under interrogation to an attack none of them committed. It took another man's confession, and his DNA, thirteen years later, to prove it.
First report·NYPD, prosecutors, and the New York tabloid press
"Wilding" teens attack Central Park jogger
A woman jogging in Central Park was beaten and raped, left in a coma. Five Black and Latino teenagers — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise — were interrogated for hours without adequate access to parents or counsel and gave confessions that were later shown to be coerced, inconsistent with each other, and unsupported by the physical evidence.
Real-estate developer Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers referencing the case and calling for the death penalty, before any trial had taken place.
Four convicted at trial; Wise convicted separately
Despite no forensic evidence connecting any of them to the crime and DNA at the scene that did not match any of the five, four of the teenagers were convicted based substantially on their confessions; Wise, tried separately, was convicted soon after. All five served full sentences, six to thirteen years.
Convictions vacated after another man confesses and DNA matches
Matias Reyes, already serving time for other rapes and a murder, confessed to the Central Park attack and said he had acted alone. His DNA matched evidence from the scene that had never matched any of the five. A judge vacated all five convictions.
The city settled the five men's lawsuit for malicious prosecution and racial discrimination for $41 million, more than two decades after their arrests.
Fourteen years after the convictions were vacated by DNA evidence and another man's confession, Trump told CNN the men were guilty regardless, calling the city's settlement "outrageous" — a reminder that a fully proven correction doesn't automatically overwrite the version that ran first.
This is the clearest case here that a correction, however total, doesn't automatically replace the version of the story that ran first. A confession, a DNA match, a vacated conviction, and a $41 million settlement weren't enough. Some people simply keep the original.
A Pulitzer Prize for a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict. The child never existed.
First report·Washington Post
"Jimmy's World"
Reporter Janet Cooke wrote about an 8-year-old boy she called Jimmy, describing him as a third-generation heroin addict being injected daily by his mother's boyfriend. Editors pressed her for Jimmy's identity to protect him and connect him with help; she refused, citing source protection.
Cooke admits Jimmy never existed; Pulitzer returned
Under pressure after discrepancies surfaced in her official biography, Cooke admitted to editors that Jimmy was a composite she had invented. She resigned, and the Post returned the Pulitzer — the only time this has happened in the prize's history.
The Post's own editors caught this one, inside their own newsroom, within a week of the prize that should have made the fabrication hardest to challenge. The system worked — but only after the story had already carried the paper's full institutional weight behind it.
Fabricated quotes. Invented datelines from cities he never visited. Passages lifted from other papers. Thirty-six of seventy-three stories, and it took years to catch.
First report·New York Times
Blair begins a run of national reporting, including the Beltway sniper case
Jayson Blair's byline appeared on high-profile national stories over the following six months, filed with datelines from cities and interviews that, an internal review later found, often never happened.
The paper devotes four pages to its own reporter's fraud
An internal Times investigation found 36 of the 73 national stories Blair filed over six months were marred by fabrication, plagiarism, or invented datelines — faked quotes, scenes he didn't witness, and passages copied from other outlets.
Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd resigned, taking institutional responsibility for a newsroom culture that let the fabrications continue for months without being caught.
Aftermath·New York Times internal review committee
Times creates a public editor position in response
A committee chaired by assistant managing editor Allan Siegal recommended new standards and editing positions specifically to catch this kind of failure earlier — the paper changing its own structure in response to what its own reporting had missed.
The fabrications were about places and people nobody outside the Times was positioned to check. It took the paper's own editors, and it cost two of them their jobs, to find what its own byline had been hiding.
A senator described running for cover from gunfire on a 1996 trip. The network news video of that exact landing shows her calmly greeted by a child with flowers.
First report·Senator Hillary Clinton, foreign policy speech
"I remember landing under sniper fire"
Describing a 1996 trip to Bosnia as first lady, Clinton said there was "supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
The network's own video shows no sniper fire, no running
CBS video from the actual 1996 landing showed Clinton walking calmly across the tarmac and stopping to greet a child who read her a poem. A review of more than 100 contemporaneous news stories from the trip found no record of any security threat.
Correction·Hillary Clinton, to the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board
"I misspoke"
A week after first telling the story, Clinton said she had "misspoke[n]," revising her account to say she had merely been told there was a sniper threat in the area — a claim itself not supported by the contemporaneous reporting from the trip.
No case here sits closer to Brian Williams' than this one: a public figure's own account, retold enough times to harden into something the actual footage doesn't support. The difference is how fast the correction landed — days here, twelve years there, because a network happened to still have the tape.
A radio play caused mass hysteria, newspapers reported the next morning. Ratings data from that very night show almost nobody was even listening.
First report·National newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, and others)
"Radio Listeners in Panic"
The morning after Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre broadcast a fictional Martian-invasion news bulletin, newspapers across the country ran front-page stories describing nationwide hysteria, mass flight, and even suicides linked to the program.
Correction·Slate, citing research by Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow
Ratings data: about 2 percent of radio listeners were even tuned in
C.E. Hooper ratings data from that exact night showed the broadcast drew a tiny fraction of the radio audience. Researchers found no verified suicides tied to the program, and hospitals surveyed weeks later had no records of panic-related admissions — the "hysteria" newspapers described was never measured, only reported.
Newspapers had a motive: radio was taking their ad revenue
Pooley and Socolow's research concluded the panic narrative served the newspaper industry's own interest — radio was pulling Depression-era advertising dollars away from print, and a story about reckless, dangerous radio programming helped make the case to advertisers and regulators that radio couldn't be trusted.
The most durable myth in this whole ledger is also the oldest, and it took 75 years to correct: the outlets that manufactured it had a competitive reason to keep telling it, and the audience that believed it had no ratings data of its own to check it against.
A tearful 15-year-old told Congress that Iraqi soldiers pulled newborns from incubators and left them to die. She was the ambassador's daughter, and a PR firm wrote the script.
First report·Congressional Human Rights Caucus
Girl identified only as "Nayirah" testifies to babies thrown from incubators
Testifying under only her first name, "Nayirah" described Iraqi soldiers storming a Kuwaiti hospital, pulling babies from incubators, and leaving them to die on the floor. The testimony was widely covered and repeatedly cited by senators and President George H.W. Bush in building the case for the Gulf War.
Correction·Independent journalists and human rights investigators
The witness is the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter
Reporting revealed "Nayirah" was Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. Her appearance had been arranged by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a group organized and paid for by the Kuwaiti government through the PR firm Hill & Knowlton as part of a roughly $10 million campaign.
Retraction·Human rights investigators, follow-up interviews
No independent corroboration of the incubator claim was ever found
When later interviewed, Nayirah herself described having actually seen a single baby outside an incubator for "no more than a moment" — a far narrower claim than the testimony as delivered and covered. No hospital records, other witnesses, or human rights investigation ever substantiated the mass-incubator account.
The testimony worked exactly as designed: an anonymous, sympathetic witness, an unverifiable atrocity, and no disclosure of who had staged it or paid for it. By the time the arrangement surfaced, the war it helped justify was already over.
A congressman-elect's campaign biography — his college degree, his Wall Street jobs, his family's history — mostly didn't hold up to a single newspaper actually calling to check.
First report·George Santos campaign materials, local press coverage
Santos elected on a biography built from his own unverified claims
Campaign materials and largely uncontested local coverage described Santos as a Baruch College graduate with jobs at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and grandparents who fled Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.
A Times investigation found no record Santos had graduated from Baruch College or worked at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, and a separate report found no evidence his grandparents had fled the Holocaust as his campaign claimed.
Days after the Times report, Santos told reporters he had embellished his résumé and was "sorry," while denying he had lied about being Jewish, saying he meant "Jew-ish" as a reference to distant ancestry.
Following a House Ethics Committee report finding Santos had stolen from his own campaign, the House voted to expel him — bipartisan, and only the sixth expulsion in the chamber's history.
Santos pleads guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft
Santos admitted to filing fraudulent campaign finance reports, stealing donor identities, and embezzling campaign funds — closing the loop from an unverified campaign biography to a federal felony conviction.
Every fact in the original biography was checkable before the election: a phone call to Baruch College, a phone call to Goldman Sachs. Nobody made either one until a newspaper did, seven weeks after he'd already won.
This is not a bias scorecard and it does not rank outlets. Every story here ran through the ordinary mechanics of reporting under pressure: an anonymous source, a breaking event, an official who spoke before anyone could check. What links the entries is that the record now shows how each one actually resolved — including the cases where the original outlet corrected itself.
Selection favors well-documented, multiply-sourced cases with a settled record over live political fights. The pattern is the point, not today's argument — and that includes coverage errors from every kind of outlet, not one side of anything.
Every revision above cites a named outlet, official body, or agency record. Quoted text is quoted only where the source itself is directly quoted.
Spot an error, a dead link, or a case that should be added? Report it. Corrections are filed the same day they're verified — the same standard this page holds everyone else to.