Washington Post's Dana Milbank Smears the Heritage Foundation

Dana Milbank attended an event on Benghazi and terrorism that was hosted at the Heritage Foundation, and wrote up a dishonest smear piece about it. He omits key facts about participants, attributes beliefs to them are not accurate, omits key details about one of the participants, and makes hash of what actually happened in order to present a picture of the event that is not even close to accurate. His story cannot be explained by incompetence. It’s an intentional smear job.

To start with, the event wasn’t even a Heritage Foundation event. Milbank says it was in the title of his piece: “Heritage’s ugly Benghazi panel.” Heritage provided the room for the event, but an outside group was the actual host.

Mollie Hemingway did the first take-down, here at the Federalist. Politico’s Dylan Byers has the second, here.

Heritage is so confident that it and its panelists have been smeared that it plans on releasing the whole video of the event.

The Federalist is one of those right-wingy sites (like this one), so the Post’s glitterati will probably dismiss it. It will be harder to dismiss Byers. Indeed, Milbank has responded to Byers’ questions and his answers are included in Byers’ piece. They’re unsatisfactory.

There are several takeaways from this. The panel was about Islam and terrorism, and was held at a conservative venue. Milbank evidently went into the event not to learn anything, but to execute a hatchet job on a) people who are concerned about Islamic terrorism, and b) conservatives. His piece is published as opinion, but as Ace says, that doesn’t entitle him to run off into Jayson Blair territory and make stuff up.

Milbank gives away his game early on in the write-up.

Representatives of prominent conservative groups converged on the Heritage Foundation on Monday afternoon for the umpteenth in a series of gatherings to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy.

Milbank may not care about Benghazi, but a majority of the American people do and want it investigated. The families of the victims deserve answers that the Obama administration promised them but has not delivered. So Milbank is out of touch, to say the least. The “umpteenth” amounts to bragging that he can’t be bothered to do anything but run interference for the Obama administration on a foreign policy disaster that got Americans killed, and about which Obama lied.

The Post now has a serious credibility problem on its hands. Milbank and one of the MSM’s go-to sources, Media Matters, have both been exposed here — Milbank for fabricating a story, Media Matters for defending him.

What will the Post do? Silence won’t do. Reporters who engage in the level of dishonesty that Milbank shows in his story deserve to be ushered through the door and into another line of work.