ABC News apologizes for incorrect Paul Manafort graphic

ABC News has issued an apology after posting an incorrect graphic stating that Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort had pleaded “guilty to 5 charges of manslaughter.”

The erroneous lower-third graphic appeared for approximately seven seconds during a special report on Wednesday on Donald Trump’s plan to sign an executive order to end his family separation policy.

Trump said “we want to solve this immigration problem that’s been going on for 40 years, more — it’s been going on forever” in light of outcry about his zero-tolerance policy at the border. During ABC News’ coverage of the announcement, the chyron at the bottom of the screen initially read: “President Trump: ‘I’ll be signing something’ to address family separation crisis.”

However, the caption quickly changed mistakenly to “Manafort pleads guilty to 5 charges of manslaughter.” The updated chyron was quickly taken down since the statement was obviously incorrect. The banner soon returned to the previous headline about Trump’s actions regarding the border policy.

ABC News took to Twitter to send out a statement to apologize for misreporting the news about Manafort. “We regret and apologize for the false lower third graphic that aired during our special report. We are investigating how incorrect information was in our system and how and why it was allowed to air.”

The statement continued: “We apologize to our viewers and to Mr. Manafort. There simply is no excuse for this sort of mistake.”

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