CNN found itself in an embarrassing backpedal this week after falsely claiming that former President Donald Trump had fabricated a story about the Biden administration spending millions to make mice “transgender.”
What began as a routine fact-check quickly unraveled when the White House released documentation proving Trump’s claim was, in fact, accurate.
During his joint address to Congress, Trump called out examples of government waste that he had eliminated, including an $8.2 million expenditure on NIH-funded studies involving hormone treatments in mice.
CNN’s Deidre McPhillips, eager to challenge the statement, initially dismissed the claim as false, asserting that only about $500,000 had gone toward similar research in monkeys. But as it turned out, the numbers told a very different story.
Shortly after CNN’s so-called fact-check was published, the White House fired back with a statement outlining six NIH grants, totaling over $8.2 million, that had been used to fund studies involving hormone therapy in mice.
The studies ranged from exploring how hormone treatments affect HIV vaccine responses to their impact on reproductive systems and breast cancer risks. Every one of them, in some form, involved administering cross-sex hormone therapy to mice.
CNN was forced to make an abrupt correction. The network changed its initial claim that “Trump falsely claimed” the spending occurred, revising it to the much softer phrase, “This claim needs context.” Acknowledging their blunder, CNN admitted in an update: “An earlier version of this item incorrectly characterized as false Trump’s claim about federal money being spent for ‘making mice transgender.’”
The network then attempted to reframe the situation, arguing that Trump’s wording lacked nuance. According to McPhillips, “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.”
In other words, CNN conceded that the studies did exist and that the money had been spent as Trump described—just that they disagreed with his phrasing.