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In case you missed it: Last Wednesday, ABC News published a story about the remarkable success of Donald Trump Jr.’s and Eric Trump’s investments in defense companies that have benefited from government contracts since their father returned to the White House. The piece contained several errors. But the network’s handling of the mistakes proved to be a mess.

The article, written by an entry-level desk assistant, led with an announcement from President Trump that Anduril Industries, a defense technology company, had been awarded a multibillion-dollar contract from the federal government to build a shipyard. It also claimed that 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, had “a major stake in Anduril” from “a $2.5 billion investment into the company” and that defense companies backed by the president’s sons have “raked in more than $6 billion in active or promised government contracts since those investments were made.” 

But 1789 Capital had invested fifty million dollars in Anduril, not the two and a half billion the article cited. That and other inaccuracies prompted fierce pushback from Donald Trump Jr., a spokesperson for 1789, and Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder and—it’s worth noting—a major MAGA fundraiser. (In addition to accusing ABC of “a coordinated influence operation,” Luckey went so far as to track down a random ABC News van.) 

Mistakes happen. A mistake at this level, at a time when the Trump administration is waging war on the press and ABC in particular, presents a serious problem. But instead of quickly acknowledging the errors, editors pulled the story down last Thursday without any note of explanation. The link led to a 404 page. An anonymous company source told several media reporters that the story had been “published prematurely.”

ABC’s silence made a bad situation much worse, leaving an information vacuum that journalists rushed to fill. Nothing amplifies a story more than pulling it without comment, especially one as high-profile as this (it had been shared by Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, on X). And the lack of transparency left a mystery with a trail of digital breadcrumbs that reporters were bound to follow. Status and Semafor did just that, publishing postmortems with reporting that cast doubt on the idea that the story had been published “prematurely,” a word many naturally took to mean accidentally.

A source familiar with the situation pushed back on that characterization to me, saying that when ABC said the story was published “prematurely,” it hadn’t intended to suggest that there had simply been a publishing or technical error. The point was that the original piece failed to meet the network’s editorial and reporting standards and required additional work to ensure its accuracy. 

Last Friday, the story was republished—without a byline, and with a lengthy correction referring to “errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies.” The new version “contains corrected information and additional context,” the message read. According to Lachlan Cartwright, of Breaker, the incident is still being investigated and could lead to disciplinary measures.

There must be stringent safeguards in place at ABC for stories involving the president and his family. Clearly, something failed here, and it goes well beyond a junior reporter getting his numbers wrong. However the matter is handled internally, ABC will be mopping up for a bit longer. Bernie Moreno, the Ohio senator, has called for a Federal Communications Commission investigation and, according to Brian Stelter, Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, has apparently obliged. But the story never appeared on an ABC broadcast, and the FCC doesn’t have oversight of online content. Ultimately, Trump’s sons are benefiting from the chaos, as they continue to enrich themselves. Fifty million dollars may not buy a majority stake in Anduril, but it’s still a lot of money.

No Democrat has won a US Senate seat in Kansas since 1932. But this year’s race, between the incumbent, Roger Marshall, and Adam Hamilton, a Democrat and pastor, has become competitive. Polls show the race is essentially tied, though Hamilton appears to have developed a slight advantage over the past month. This unexpected turn has been made possible largely because of rigorous journalism—at the national and local levels.

In September, the New York Times kicked off an embarrassing string of stories on Marshall with a piece reporting that, during his twenty-five-plus-year career as an ob-gyn, he sued more than seven hundred former patients. The story was quickly followed by robust reporting from local outlets in Kansas—where, as Sherman Smith, the editor in chief of the Kansas Reflector, told me, the news scene is thriving. “There’s this sort of misnomer that news is dying or that people don’t care about news anymore. And I just don’t see that that’s true,” he said. He founded the Reflector in 2020. “There are a lot of things happening in Kansas right now that are really mission-driven,” he noted, and “we have a greater appetite for quality news than I’ve seen in my lifetime.” 

Last week, Smith published a joint investigation with Matt Fuller of MS Now drawing on audio, video, photos, calendar entries, and more than two hundred texts from Marshall’s 2020 run. The materials appear to show Marshall and Brent Robertson, his chief of staff, “repeatedly using congressional staff and government resources in ways experts say likely crossed the line between official business and campaigning.” The reporting also included the extraordinary revelation that, according to Marshall’s most recent Federal Election Commission filing, “no one working for Marshall’s campaign had received a paycheck in the past five years—a situation that campaign finance experts said was potentially unprecedented in the modern era of politics.”

Smith and Fuller note that Marshall used campaign funds to book a flight for an October trip to Dallas in 2020, “but he used taxpayer dollars for a meal, despite the only official event on his calendar being a Zoom meeting.” According to a calendar screenshot, Marshall was in fact “at a Cowboys v. Giants game, three meetings and a fundraising dinner all marked as political events.” When a staffer asked Robertson about the primary purpose of another trip, the reply came back in a text: “Primary purpose is what we say it is.”

Whether any of the reporting—the Kansas City Star had more on Marshall’s debt collection practices this week—will persuade Kansans to elect a Democrat remains to be seen. Smith is skeptical. “Every time Republicans have gotten in trouble in Kansas—in the Senate race in 2014 with Pat Roberts and then in 2020 with Marshall—there’s just an avalanche of money that came in in the final month that didn’t just tip the scale, but led to double-digit wins for the Republicans,” he told me. “Even when they’ve had their biggest threats, they’re able to recover.” But the Reflector is continuing to aggressively cover both candidates. There are two weeks to go.

On a Saturday last year, in the early morning hours, a twenty-five-year-old woman arrived at the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital for a rape kit. “Over the next two months, she did everything a rape victim is supposed to do. Her case produced a DNA match to the man she identified, who was already in the FBI’s database. And then San Francisco did what it almost always does with rape cases: nothing,” Anya Schultz, an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Standard, wrote in July. 

Schultz began looking into the San Francisco Police Department’s handling of rape cases in January, when the woman, who had been a source for another story, shared her devastating experience. “She was left with no investigation and no justice,” Schultz said. According to her reporting, the SFPD cleared just 14 percent of rape cases last year—half the national rate, according to data reported to the FBI, and one of the lowest in the state of California. The department’s clearance rate was also among the lowest of any major US city: “Over the past four years, a rape was more than three times as likely to be solved if it was reported in Denver, Nashville, or Milwaukee. And it’s not a caseload problem—each of these cities had more reported rapes than San Francisco.” 

Last week, Schultz’s work had meaningful impact. At a hearing called by local leaders in response to her report, the SFPD announced that it would change how it handles sexual assault cases and promised major reforms. “It was pretty surreal to be in a hearing where all of our elected officials were grilling the police with the same questions that I’ve been asking them for months and they’ve been not responding,” Schultz told me. She also believes that the national conversation about recent rape allegations at Cornell University played a role: “I’m not sure if the outcome of the hearing would have been the same without everything happening right now.”

Hat tip to the Local Matters newsletter for highlighting the SF Standard’s reporting. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.

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