Letters to the Editor
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who were those four sources..
bush..cheney .. rice ..wolfowitz ???
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"Schneider, come to my office..."
ABC Exec: What's going on with the Salon blogger?
Schneider: He's been criticizing our reporting on Iran and after I'd contacted him to correct the record he started criticizing Ross's anthrax reports in 2001.
ABC Exec: Maybe this is an instance where it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Schneider: I think we need to...
ABC Exec: It's not productive to rehash the Anthrax reporting. Let's just move on.
Schneider: But if Greenwald persists...
ABC Exec: Look, Schneider, perhaps you're still in shock but take if from me: you've just been run over this Greenwald tank and you're not thinking clearly. All you did was piss this guy off when you called him about the Iran report and now he's killing on the Anthrax stories, where frankly we're on rather soft ground, aren't we? Does the word "bentonite" mean anything to you?
Schneider: I merely told Greenwald that we had retracted...
ABC Exec: Stop. Stop. Not one more call to Greenwald. Do you understand me? Another call to this guy and he'll be giving us the Fox News treatment! Have you seen what he's done to those sorry sons of bitches? YOU DO NOT KNOW GLENN GREENWALD. I want you to erase his phone number and e-mail from your computer. I don't want to hear his name AGAIN. Do you understand.
Schneider: Look...
ABC Exec: I asked you if you understood. One more call to Greenwald and you'll be doing human interest stories at an affiliate in Alaska. Now get out of here.
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Hey, Salon!
That's an ad for "Notes on a Scandal" blocking a paragraph of text. Please try to do a better job making sure that the advertising doesn't block the content.
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all better
ad's gone now. Thanks!
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Whispers:
That's an ad for "Notes on a Scandal" blocking a paragraph of text. Please try to do a better job making sure that the advertising doesn't block the content.
That happened to me, too. It obviously shouldn't. I've notified Salon about the problem and asked them to fix it.
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Wow.
Okay, somebody remind me to never irritate Glenn.
I think my current list of "People I never want to have pissed off at me" stands at:
1. The South Park guys
2. Glenn
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Thank you
I am a recent reader of your articles and I must say you are truly remarkable. Thanks for doing what you do and taking the time to really explain and teach about the principles of credibility. Thanks for holding the media accountable not in a partisan way but in a way to make them understand the role they play in this thing called Democracy!!
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Two words come to mind here
advocacy journalism
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And it's still a story...
It's a mystery. Everyone loves a mystery. Just like, "Who is the real father of Anna Nicole's baby?" But no one is covering it, except a few dogged researchers and reporters like Glenn Greenwald and Ed Lake. Odd, isn't it? It makes you wonder because it does involve Democratic politicians, Leahy, Daschle, etc. (just not Gary Condit). But they were victims, not alleged perpetrators. Perhaps it just lacks a missing white woman (Chandra Levy).
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Good point about...
Ahmedinijad.
The American War Party props this guy up as a lunatic until he begins the bully talk.
Then, as you suggest, he's suddenly to be believed.
Which dovetails into the ABC meme: ABC, being the good War Party advocates they are, were not going to correct previous false info as long as the flag was drapped off their pro-war propaganda reporting.
I love the way the 4th estate stenographers now collectively bury their heads' in the sand when confronted with polls that show the American public thinks Bush & his 4th estate approved war is a disaster.
That's why they now do People Magazine hit jobs on Nancy Pelosi & extensive "critical analysis" pieces on Ann Nicole Smith.
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ABC Dugg themselves Deeper
What an idiotic and substance free, easily rebutted response ABC makes. Particularly, they changed their story, and used the white house's denial to cover their asses. What happened? Why was the White House's new denial considered important enough to override their sources all of a sudden?
Did the sources change stories? What did the sources say about being wrong? ABC can give us plenty more on these sources even without outing them.
Are the sources still trusted for stories? Were they ever trusted again?
The Path-to-911 sham really was representative of what is wrong with the Network, and not some fluke aberration or 1 time failure of standards.
They would have been better to let it lie and pretend Glenn's Salon column isn't important enough for them to respond to. Now it's clear they know about the problem, and obtusely get the details of their mistake wrong, and issue an insufficient retraction.
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Proof positive ...
... that ABC should be considered nothing but a mouthpiece for the White House. "Well, the White House said we were wrong, so that's our admission of error. Because obviously you can believe anything the White House says. We do - even when it says we're wrong."
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disingenuous
Two additions to points made in ABC's response and your response to it:
First of all, the disingenuous nature of the so-called "retraction" is even more pronounced when you consider how Ross frames the news of a lack of bentonite. Remember that it was the existence of bentonite in the samples that gave them the justification to finger Saddam Hussein and Iraq, on the say-so of their multiple "well-placed sources." But when Ross finally had to confront the fact that there was no such finding, he did two things. The first, as you mentioned, was in implying that the White House somehow agreed with ABC's sources initially. The second was in this 'graph:
The White House says there are chemical additives in that anthrax including one called silica. Now, that's not a trademark of any one country's weapons program, but it is known to be used, Peter, by Iraq, Russia and the US in making a military-style anthrax.
I would assume that the average viewer would rule out someone in the US military as the culprit, and probably Russia as well since most people consider the Cold War to be ancient history. So here they are still pointing the finger at Iraq, even though the evidence remained inconclusive. It's almost as though Ross is desperately trying to maintain the original point of the claim, which is that Iraq was the responsible party. One has to wonder if journalistic integrity was the motivation here.
Secondly, the retraction itself, if it could be called that, was insufficient for a very simple reason -- again as you pointed out -- that the bentonite story was continually referred to by others, and is still cited as a justification for going to war:
As I documented in the prior post, long after that November 1 comment from Ross which Schneider tries to depict as a retraction, the ABC "bentonite" reports continued to be cited by those -- such as The Weekly Standard -- to argue that Iraq was responsible for the anthrax attacks. Indeed, to this day various pro-war pundits continue to cite those ABC reports as "proof" of a connection between Saddam and the anthrax attacks.
Simply put, if you shout fire in a movie theater and people begin to panic, you have an obligation to "retract" your shouting to calm people down if there is no actual fire that could cause harm. If you say it quietly and a couple next to you sits back down to finish the movie, you might think you've done all you can to restore order (and your credibility). But if others in the theater are obviously still leaving, or checking nervously for smoke, or kicking over old ladies to get out, you have an obligation to again point out your mistake, loudly and clearly, until everyone understands it was a false alarm, and apologize for falsely causing a scare.