The way the report on President Trump’s attempts to “conceal” interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin has evolved in just one day is a perfect case study in how media sloppiness and imprecision create false stories.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with Putin, including “taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter” on “at least one occasion” and telling her not to discuss the meeting with others.

This sounds profound and troubling, until you consider a key detail: Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was present for the 2017 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, where the interpreter was supposedly asked to hand over her notes.

Post reporter Greg Miller noted as much, writing that after the Helsinki meeting the American interpreter for that one “could be seen emerging from the meeting with pages of notes.” And though there was no formal readout about the details of that meeting, the report doesn’t explicitly say what happened with those notes, if anything at all.

And yet, reiterations of the Post’s report by other media outlets neglect to include this context, putting forth only the most salacious bit about Trump taking his interpreter’s notes.

CNN did it all Monday morning. “The Washington Post reports that the president went to extraordinary lengths to hide the details of his meetings with Vladimir Putin even from officials within his own administration,” declared anchor Alisyn Camerota. “The paper reports the president of the United States took his interpreter’s notes after the meeting with Putin and wouldn’t let other people see them.”

When claiming Trump went to “extraordinary lengths to hide the details” from “officials within his own administration,” maybe you should mention that the secretary of state was in the room. Or that the interpreter notes from at least one other meeting may not have been touched at all.

An on-screen graphic a few minutes later blared the headline, “Trump took translator's notes after Putin meeting.”

And CNN’s John Avlon introduced a segment later asserting that Trump “took his interpreter’s notes away in order to hide details about a private meeting with Putin.” Nothing about Tillerson being present for the meeting.

An ABC report summarized the Post’s initial article as “the president going to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Putin, including moves Trump allegedly took to seize notes from the interpreter at a meeting he held with Putin in Hamburg.” Tillerson’s name wasn’t mentioned a single time in ABC’s story.

This is precisely how bogus storylines are formed: Nothing was invented out of whole cloth. Instead, a fairly harmless story is repeated over and over again, except without the context so that readers and viewers are left with a warped impression as far as possible from the truth.