Kansas City Star punks itself – the McClatchy owned newspaper published an article about Glenn Beck’s wife and the Census based largely on”her” paranoid writings on a Myspace page. Glenn pointed out today this is a fake Myspace account…
A followup on an affiliated web site pointing out their mistake has been deleted (it showed up in my Google News feed). The online article now has a paragraph adding that Beck has stated it wasn’t written by his wife
I had hope for McClatchy for boldly going after Goldman Sachs, but it looks like they have joined the Dan Rather school of Journalism – okay we didn’t fact check with a skeptical eye, we were told beyond a reasonable doubt that the source turned out to be fake – but we will not retract the story nor apologize because our story sounds like it could be true.
2008 – the year journalism died.
You are so right – you hope they will do the right thing, but the Drive-by Media continues to disappoint.
Kinda like a delinquent teenager.
I think we can all agree they are a FAR cry from Journalists.
Followup here
Right on script, the “journalist” admits the myspace page was bogus, but doesn’t apologize and doesn’t withdraw his premise that Census paranoia is rampant among Right Wing nut cases.
Now if he was actually a reporter and not just a political lemming, he would ask the Census Dept what the compliance rate is among African Americans and why it is necessary to target Special money within the Black Community to increase cooperation.
Hint: IRS 1040 counts vs adults living in a census tract
Glenn said they would be discussing this more in the fourth hour (for Glenn Beck extremists only). I bet Media Matters is paying for a subscription so the monitor all this extremism.
There was a third post (not bothering to link it) from some sort of reader ombudsmen thanking the author for admitting his mistake and his non-apology.