Stop digging

I'm sure no one is really paying attention to Powerline's continued refusal to take any responsibility for the slanderous lies they've been telling about the Schiavo memo for the last two weeks.  Their tortured defense of themselves is so laughable that no one but the most blind partisan can take them seriously.  But they appear to be attempting to save face with their readers, and we can't allow them to get away with it.  Though I quoted their most recent excuses earlier, I wanted to examine their logic in a little more detail:

Jack Shafer at Slate thinks that the lesson of the Schiavo memo is that "blogs have reached a sort of parity with their mainstream colleagues" in that "bloggers proved themselves the equals of their mainstream media colleagues. . .by ignoring or glossing over their goof." To the extent that Shafer includes Power Line in this verdict, his claim is baseless. On the evening of April 6, we learned from the Washington Post's Mike Allen that the Schiavo memo was written by a Martinez staffer. Earlier that day, I had characterized the memo as "questionable if not fake." As soon as I learned that a Martinez staffer was the author, I updated my post to state that the memo was not a Democratic dirty trick, and that it came from a Republican source. Since then, Rocket has written a Weekly Standard piece about the memo called "It Wasn't Fake," and has stated that he was mistaken in concluding that it was.

Compare this with the conduct of CBS. It claimed for about two weeks that its fake memo was authentic. Eventually it backed away from that claim, but still has never said the memo was fake.

Yes, let's compare Powerline to CBS.  CBS received a memo.  They had some evidence from a source implying that it was authentic.  They had it further examined, and they claimed the memo was authentic.  In hindsight, their evidence was bad and was insufficient to support their claim; their authentication process was poor and their journalism sloppy.  So an independent panel reviewed the process, and concluded it was deeply flawed.  Several people lost their jobs as a result.

Powerline, on the other hand, never had any piece of evidence that the memo was fake.  There was no person, credible or not, that came forward and said, "I know this memo is fake."  There were a few unrelated facts (not on Senate letterhead, spelling errors) that suggested the memo was hastily/poorly written, but not that suggested, in and of themselves, that it was fake.  Powerline, rather than having evidence, had a suspicion.  That's an important distinction to make.  I'm a partisan; if I see something that reflects poorly on my side, I might suspect that it's a republican dirty trick (as I have done before); but let's not confuse that with having evidence.  And if I were to claim that something is "most likely" without a clear reason to believe it is "most likely," that really means that that's just what I want to believe.  But Powerline didn't just say that it was most likely a Democratic dirty trick.  They actually said unequivocally on more than one occasion that the memo was fake. 

Instead engaging in some self-reflection, or having someone from the outside do it (as CBS did), Powerline is actually still defending itself.  In their case, some sort of self-examination is called for and appropriate.  They accused a political party of something that it didn't do for two and a half weeks.  They claimed as false something that was authentic.  A thought process that would lead to two such irrefutable errors should prompt a look at what went wrong, as well as an apology to those they lied about.  Dan Rather had the grace to say "I'm sorry."

To further the CBS comparison, unfortunately for all of us, the Powerline bloggers will not lose their blogging jobs over this.  There will be no accountability. 

And to top it all off, they appear to be misleading their readers again:

We were "wrong" in the sense that we laid out the evidence and said that based on the available evidence, we thought that the memo was a fake.  We did not report as a fact that the memo was a fake, and we did not purport to have any information that was not publicly available.

That appears to be untrue, or best misleading.  "We have written extensively about the fake 'talking points memo' on the Schaivo case."  "[T]he Republican party has taken a giant PR hit as a result of the popular belief, fueled by news reports on the fake memo."  "Someone at the Post swallowed the fake memo hook, line, and sinker."  By the end of the scandal, they were assuming the memo was fake, and talking about it as if it were.  There was no hedging, no equivocation.

Any reader could follow our logic and either agree or disagree with our opinion. But the Post was "wrong" in a much different and more serious way. The Post reported as a fact that the memo was written by "Republican officials" and was "distributed to Republican senators by party leaders." The Post didn't say that was an opinion, or a guess, or an inference; they reported those statements as facts, without giving the reader any information about how the paper knew them to be true.

As Powerline has actually pointed out before, only the original draft of the story, sent through the Post's wire service, said it was "distributed to Republican senators by party leader."  According to  Kurtz, the Post sent out an "advisory" about this after the fact.  It was fixed for the print edition.  The Post did correct the error itself, and they corrected it immediately.  The rest of the Post's reporting, that it was a republican talking points memo, was accurate.

Since they want to be compared to CBS, maybe we should start an independent panel to investigate Powerline's reporting procedures.  I wonder if they'd be up for it?

-- Michael

Comments

[Jeff]

@ Michael

You have missed the final irony: Powerline viewed the CBS investigation as a "whitewash." The Powerline crew would fail the criteria applied by the CBS report, as you point out, but they themselves claimed those criteria were not stringent enough. Their "proof" of that is that Rather never has admitted that the TANG memoes were crude forgeries, but has weasled around. Now I personally agree that Rather has been guilty of frenetic weasling, but who are the Powerline crew to carp? They are world-class weasles.

[Ed Drone]

[The Post reported as a fact that the memo was written by "Republican officials" and was "distributed to Republican senators by party leaders."]

Well, it seems I remember Martinez admitting to having handed the wrong memo to a Democrat, so, if he wasn't "distributing [the memo] to Republican senators...," I don't know what he was doing. In other words, the memo WAS distributed, by Republicans, and only a slip-up got it into Democratic hands (and it wasn't even via viewing files in a computer directory to which one party wasn't supposed to have access).

So the Post didn't even need to post that "correction."

I think weasels would resent the comparison, myself.

Ed

[the exile]

Let's not forget that the Rather memos have not been proven forgeries; what was proven was a lack of due diligence in establishing the chain of provenance. That's it, boys, yet for that, people were fired. The investigating commission, led by a prominent Republican, deliberately chose NOT to investigate the authenticity of the documents. So on this Powerline is right that the Commission was a whitewash. It was a kangaroo court convened by CBS brass to give the boot to Rather and Mapes. It was tasked and defined in such a way that it would not and COULD NOT find corroborating or exculpatory evidence. It was explicitly designed to advance the coverup of Bush's TNG record. And the leftie blogs have mostly agreed that Rather was unprofessional (he was) and that the documents were fakes (no hard evidence of that yet, period). If we acted like powerline, we would still be defending Mapes and treating the documents as true. That's why they win and we lose. They laugh at us for our weakness, and they're too often right.

[Bic]

Just two points to add to this thread.

1)With regards to the CBS escapade. CBS's own experts who were asked to validate the documents prior to airing the piece reported that they could not. The only validation done by CBS was on one signature on one page. Since then, every expert in typography and publishing that has made a public statement has come out against the veracity of the document, many even to the point of stating that they are 100% positive they are forgeries. Even the CBS investigators believe so but as they were not tasked with that, as exile states, they did not make a formal finding on that point.

2)As for the Schivo memo, it was reported by most media sources as "talking points distributed by the Republican leadership". The fact of the matter is that it was a first draft of a memo, prepared by a relatively new legal aid to a junior Senator (had only been in office 3 months), printed accidentily and handed only to a single Democratic Senator. Even the original Republican Senator had never read the document. Hardly a talking points memo distributed by the Republican leadership as reported by most major news sources. And Ed, nice editing to leave out the word "Leadership" from your line in bold. If you do a google search you will find that about the only time that phrase appears without leadership attached is in articles after the fact. Almost every article prior to the true source being identified states "distributed by the Republican leadership". The facts being, yes a Republican aid created the memo. Yes a Republican senator "distributed" said memo. No he did not "distribute" it to any fellow Republicans, only to a single Democratic senator. Yes, the leadership denied it's veracity as they had never seen the memo claimed to be from them.

It is essentially the same as me sending a joke email from work to a friend and typing the wrong address which the unintended receiver then goes public with and the media, without any investigating of their own, unequivically claims indicates the managements position. If you don't see any reason for the management to complain, then your journalistic standards are set way too low.