Letters to the Editor
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My problem with Altercation
Eric seems intent on criticizing you for literally reporting something a friend of his said, and taking him at his word. I wrote him a letter published May 15(Josh), and he just won't let go, but now claims you have a history of being confused. Here's my latest letter, to give you my take on it. Please take this comment down if it is too long or off-topic.
Dear Eric,
In response to my comment about your failing to identify bloggers who confused a couple of WaPo stories, you write, “Well, the mistaken accusation was published in more places than I could have tracked at the time. The original error, if I'm not mistaken, was made by Glenn Greenwald. I was trying to be nice by not pointing that out yesterday.”
Hmm. Ok. You called my bluff. The least I can do is see what happened. The May 14 statement of yours that I wanted to double check is as follows: “A few months ago I wrote [no link] about a case where netroots bloggers [no links] were up in arms about a Washington Post story [no link] that had allegedly been changed in order to remove the charge that Bush had lied about removing Rumsfeld right after the election. In fact, a single phone call to the author of the story [again, no link] demonstrated that no story had been changed; two separate stories [no links] had been confused. And yet the netroots-enabled myth proved impossible to disarm.”
“A few months ago I wrote?” Was it the one on November 13, 2006 that goes “Glenn Greenwald is on this so I don't have to be?” You refer to the Greenwald post of November 10, entitled “Extremely odd behavior from the Washington Post re: the President’s Rumsfeld lie” in which he notes that a phrase, “He [Bush] appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters,” was dropped from the Washington Post article written by Michael Fletcher and Peter Baker and published on November 9.
Ah, no. That wasn’t the story you wrote a “few months ago.” A search of MediaMatters returns your next reference to the topic, dated November 27. In it you actually link to a story you wrote for The Nation on November 22. It was clearly this Nation article to which you were referring and in which you write, “The Washington Post, to its credit, ran five separate news stories that touched on the lie--two online and three in the paper. (This was originally misreported in the liberal blogosphere, which charged the paper with changing the wording of its stories to protect the President from his lie. In fact, the Post merely printed multiple stories with differing descriptions of the lie, with no subsequent changes in any of them.)”
So, Eric, unfortunately we need to take another look at those five stories. As long as one of them contains the quoted phrase, “He appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters,” your “single phone call to the author of the story” will have been an efficient bit of sleuthing on your part. By the way, may we assume that your “single phone call to the author” was a conference call with both Fletcher and Baker, the two reporters who co-wrote the sole article mentioned by Greenwald? If no such phrase exists in any final version of those stories, then I don’t see how you haven’t been pwned by that unimpeachable author-source of yours who told you that “In fact, the Post merely printed multiple stories with differing descriptions of the lie, with no subsequent changes in any of them.”
But then, another thing that bothered me was that you said this was “a case where netroots bloggers [plural] were up in arms,” so other than Greenwald, who else contributed to perpetrating the “myth?” A google search using the terms “Bush,” “Rumsfeld,” “Washington,” “Post,” and “lie” returns articles [incomplete list] by the following authors in order: Greenwald, Kurtz, Froomkin, Columbia Journalism Review’s Andrew Bielak, and yourself. Bielak deserves an A+ for his piece, as he smartly confirms only that Greenwald’s phrase is “not seen in the current version online,” without stating as fact that it ever existed to begin with, something beyond his ability to know. (Incidentally, I wonder if Edsall taught him that, as the former Washington Post reporter had taken his seat among Columbia’s faculty prior to this article?) The fact is, unless somebody has a cached page of the Post article with the phrase intact, Greenwald can’t prove the article had been changed. Personally, I don’t believe he made it up.
In closing, and if this is the only thing you want to publish it’s fine with me, I think you perform an incredible service and have contributed incalculable amounts to our understanding of media. You’re just not as good at doing it as you are at criticizing it, bub.