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April 07, 2005
"Non-Fake, but Inaccurate"
It turns out that the Schiavo "talking points" memo was not a fake, but was in fact drafted by a GOP staffer. However, it was not the "GOP talking points memo" that so many in the media told us it was.
In the words of Mickey Kaus, it is "Non-Fake, but Inaccurate"; this in Slate, not exactly a bastion of right-wing opinion:
WaPo's Mike Allen reports that the now-famous Schiavo "talking points" memo came from freshman GOP senator Mel Martinez's office. So that mystery is cleared up. The memo wasn't a fake. But Allen doesn't come off looking too good in this latest account. a) The memo was apparently not "distributed to Republican Senators by party leaders," as Allen's initial story, sent out through the Post news service to other papers, reported. It was--at least judging from today's account--handed to one Democratic senator, Tom Harkin, by one freshman Republican senator (who isn't in the party leadership); b) Allen doesn't explain why he told Howie Kurtz he "did not call them talking points or a Republican memo" when he had in fact done just that in the news service draft; c) Even the later, more "carefully worded" account Allen published in the Post itself was apparently wrong. Allen wroteThe whole thing was suspicious from the beginning. You had the fact that the memo wasn't on official letterhead and was rife with spelling errors. It was "unsourced". Yet many seemed to take it for granted that it was an official memo distributed to all Republican Senators. In fact, as the Washington Times has reported, not a single GOP Senator had seen the memo.In a memo distributed only to Republican senators, the Schiavo case was characterized as "a great political issue" ...
This is almost the reverse of what Allen now reports. We know the memo was distributed to at least one Democratic senator. We don't know whether it was distributed to any Republican senator other then the senator whose staffer wrote it (although it's hard to believe it wasn't given to at least some other GOP lawmakers). Allen's story left the now-unsupported impression that Republican senators were conspiratorially reading the memo amongst themselves; d) The whole "memo" fuss, as played up by WaPo and ABC's Linda Douglass, was wildly overdone even if the memo was a GOP leadership document--as if senators never consider what is a good political issue, as if that's a no-no in a democracy.
Did these people learn nothing from Rathergate? "Trust us" is not acceptable from major news organizations.
And, once again, it took bloggers to set the MSM straight. As Mick Wright puts it
As I said during Rathergate, what stories over the past thirty or forty years do we "know" to be true that aren't?I should note that we would know nothing more about this if not for the blogs. As we find in today’s WaPo story, the Senate investigation had turned up nothing. The media was stonewalling. Little came of individual calls to Senate offices and emails to reporters.
If not for a handful of blogs, a few rightwing pundits and some media watchdogs, the Washington Times probably would not have published their article, in turn putting the pressure back on the Senators and the reporters who first reported on this.
If not for the blogs, we would still be under the impression that GOP party leaders drafted that ridiculous memo and that all the Republican Senators received, read and approved of it.
Michelle Malkin has a great roundup on the issue, as does Powerline, here and here.
Posted by Tom at April 7, 2005 09:40 AM
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