CNN Forced to Issue Correction on Its Own Fact Check After Trying to Nail Trump for 'Transgender Mice'

Whoops!

Here’s the deal with “fact-checking”: It only works if the claims are actually checked against facts. You know — actual, established facts. That’s kind of the whole point of a “fact,” right?

At CNN, they seem to operate with a different definition. Over there, a claim becomes “false” simply because they haven’t seen any evidence for it — yet.

That doesn’t mean the evidence doesn’t exist. It might, and in this case, it absolutely did. The only issue was that CNN’s “fact checkers” (cue the extra-large air quotes) skipped the actual fact-checking part before calling out former President Donald Trump over his remarks about the Department of Government Efficiency. Specifically, Trump highlighted that the department found “$8 million for making mice transgender.”

Turns out, they did. CNN insisted they didn’t. The White House pulled up the receipts. And suddenly, CNN decided this claim “needs context” instead.

Again: Whoops!

For those who missed it, this came up during a section of Trump’s speech where he rattled off some eyebrow-raising spending items uncovered by DOGE. As The New York Times transcript captured, this included: “Sixty million dollars for Indigenous peoples and Afro-Caribbean empowerment in Central America — $60 million. Eight million dollars for making mice transgender — this is real. Thirty-two million dollars for a left-wing propaganda operation in Moldova. Ten million dollars for male circumcision in Mozambique. Twenty million dollars for the Arab ‘Sesame Street’ in the Middle East. It’s a program. Twenty million dollars for a program.”

And just wait until they realize Elmo’s dad supports Israel over Hamas — the only red on screen won’t be his fur, let’s just say that.

Anyway, CNN instantly sprang into action with a “j’accuse!” claiming: “Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of ‘$8 million for making mice transgender.’”

“Between the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, the National Institutes of Health awarded a total of $477,121 to three projects that involved administering feminizing hormone therapy to monkeys to understand how it may affect their immune system and make them more susceptible to HIV. Feminizing hormone therapy is a gender-affirming treatment used to block the effects of the male hormone testosterone and promote feminine characteristics among transgender women,” according to the archived version of CNN’s fact check.

“Transgender women are nearly 50 times more likely to be infected with HIV than other adults, according to one study from 2013 across 15 countries, including the U.S. It’s not clear where the $8 million figure came from.”

Well, ask and you shall receive. Right from the White House’s website itself:

“The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).” Say what you will about Trump, but you have to admit the official White House website got a lot spicier after January 20th.

The biggest chunk? $3.1 million for a study titled “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma.” And — wouldn’t you know it? — this research involved studying mice given treatments similar to those used in so-called “gender-affirming health care” (CNN’s own phrasing, not mine).

Another $1.2 million was tied to research called “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis.” And yep — once again, mice getting treatments used in gender-affirming care.

On top of that, $735,113 funded a project that didn’t even try to hide its purpose: “Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice.”

All of a sudden, CNN had to change their tune. Their revised piece said the claim “needs context,” rather than calling it flat-out false.

“The morning after Trump’s speech, the White House provided a list of $8.3 million in federal grants to health studies that involve mice receiving treatments that can be used in gender-affirming health care,” CNN’s corrected article stated.

“The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender.”

Which, of course, is not what CNN originally said.

And just to hammer this home: The whole concept of fact-checking depends on, you know, facts. I know I’m being annoyingly repetitive here, but apparently CNN missed this memo. They didn’t label this as “this part of the speech confuses us, so we’re just going to call it false until someone spoon-feeds us the data tomorrow morning.” No, this was supposed to be (let me say it louder for the people in the back) FACT-checking.

(Okay, maybe two more times. Or five.)

Fact-checking is supposed to mean: “Here’s a claim, here’s why it’s wrong, and here’s the proof.” Not “Here’s a claim, we don’t know the truth yet, but we don’t like the sound of it, so we’ll just label it false.” That’s not journalism — that’s just lazy opinion masquerading as reporting.

This right here is why the whole “fact-checking” racket that social media companies pushed after 2016 collapsed. It wasn’t just the so-called “vibes shift” after 2024 — it was because the entire system ran on this kind of nonsense.

People stopped trusting the system because it was full of garbage fact-checks like this. And anyone who dared say Trump might be right — especially media outlets — risked getting throttled in search rankings and social reach if they didn’t follow the script. It created a system nobody trusted, especially after the whole Hunter Biden laptop saga. Why would they trust it? When liberal media’s crystal balls were being used to justify Silicon Valley censorship, all in the name of fighting “fake news,” it was beyond parody.

It still is. The only difference now is that these grifters no longer have a direct line to censor button-pushers at Meta or X. So now, they’re whining about being broke and irrelevant. One more time, with feeling: Whoops!