June 2020. The New York Times reported that Russian military intelligence had offered bounties to Taliban-linked fighters for killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and that Trump had been briefed and done nothing. CNN and the rest of cable ran it for weeks. Candidate Biden hit it hard on the campaign trail.

April 15, 2021. Biden's own White House said in a background briefing that the intelligence community had "low to moderate confidence" in the bounty reporting. The reporting relied partly on detainee interrogations and was hard to verify in the field (AP, NBC, American Presidency Project transcript). NBC's headline: "Remember those Russian bounties for dead U.S. troops? Biden admin says the CIA intel is not conclusive." The White House warned Russia but did not sanction it specifically over the bounties (NYT).

Honest hedge: "low to moderate confidence" doesn't mean false. It means unproven. The story was never shown to be fabricated. But it got sold in 2020 as settled fact about a president who supposedly ignored the murder of U.S. troops.

FNN analysis: weak intelligence got treated as proven during an election, and then the downgrade got a fraction of the coverage. Gallup's 2020 trust: 40%. 2021: 36%. The year the intel was downgraded, trust kept falling.