March 2021. President Biden gives Vice President Harris the diplomatic "root causes" assignment on migration from Central America. Headlines across the media, including CNN, ABC and CBS per later roundups, call her the "border czar" (REPORTED, Fox News, SAN). July 2024, she becomes the nominee, and suddenly the line is that she was never border czar.

Technically, the official assignment was root causes: diplomacy with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, not running the southern border. PolitiFact said so in July 2024. But the press had used "border czar" for three years. When Axios argued in July 2024 that the title was wrong, readers dug up Axios's own 2021 coverage, and Axios added a note admitting it had been among the outlets that used the label (REPORTED). That's the receipt: the label was the media's own, and it only got corrected once it hurt a candidate.

FNN analysis: nobody minds a correction. People mind a correction that shows up the same week the label becomes a political problem. That's not fact-checking. That's damage control. Gallup: trust among Democrats fell 19 points in three years, and among Republicans it hit 8% (Axios, 2025).