Great Moments in Newspaper Corrections
Layers and layers of fact checkers and editors at the Washington Post:
Editors’ note: This posting contains multiple, serious factual errors that undermine its premise. Mitt Romney is not using “Keep America American,” which was once a KKK slogan, as a catchphrase in stump speeches, as the posting and headline stated. In a YouTube video that the posting said showed Romney using the phrase, Romney actually used a different phrase, “Keep America America.” Further, the video that the blog posting labelled “Mitt Romney 2012 Campaign Ad” is not actually a Romney campaign ad. The video itself states “Mitt Romney does not actually support this ad.” The posting cited accounts of Romney saying “keep America American” at an appearance last week. Independent video from the event shows him saying “Keep America America.” The Post should have contacted the Romney campaign for comment before publication. Finally, we apologize that the posting began by saying “[s]omeone didn’t do his research” when, in fact, we had not done ours.
Why, it’s like the Washington Post is part of Obama’s “non-official campaign” for his reelection, to coin a phrase.
(H/T: Jim Treacher on Twitter.)
The sad/annoying part is they will learn nothing from having to do this embarrassing correction, and the next time someone tosses out a piece of unsourced, inaccurate red meat, the WaPo will jump at it again without a fact-checker in sight.
Nobody reads the corrections except the offended.
And this phony “distort, exacerbate, smear…utter a late, weak, lame and insincere “apology” and “correction”…would be much more meaningful if EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE wasn’t …ooops…a “coincidence” that is was attempting to be severely damaging to one political party…and oooops, helped the opposite party.
In some instances, they take down the candidate completely. (a snitch in time, saves nine nine nine)
In others, it death by a thousand cuts.
The “correction/apology” is simply a coverup of the conspiracy to commit the crime in the first place.
Silly NYTimes. The next thing you know, they’ll try to claim Bush served up a plastic turkey to the troops!
(Funny how these “serious factual errors” always skew the same way: damaging the Rs and aiding and abetting the Ds. It’s almost like they were biased or something.)
Maybe the WaPo should save time and issue a blanket apology covering all the inadvertent errors they’re planning on making between now and November 2012.
It seems to me that everyone is focused on the wrong thing. Yes, Romney said “Keep America America”, instead of “Keep America American”. Like that one little ‘n’ makes all the difference. If he had said “Keep America American”, would that make him a KKK supporter? What nonsense. The real offense here is not that the Post didn’t notice the ‘n’ or whether or not it was an official campaign video. The real offense is the smear that anyone who expresses the sentiment that we should strive to “Keep America American” is a KKK sympathizer. The Post should be called out for its offensive attempts to link someone to the terroristic KKK to someone who quite clearly is opposed to all that they stood for.