bsphil wrote:
So you're upset about the fact that you assumed the validity of an initial report and made an incorrect assumption about an unclear statement inside it that has since been clarified as people have had time to digest and process the facts?
No. I'm upset that the White House mislead the media in order to garner better press for themselves. Doubly so, when it was in conjunction with an event in which they shouldn't have felt a need to do so. It speaks volumes about the administrations status-quo approach to media spin.
As to the "since been clarified"? So AP printed a correction? And they contacted every single media outlet which repeated their false portrayal of events and made sure that they got that correction out to every single person who read, saw, or heard the story so as to make sure that they don't continue to carry a false impression of the actions of the administration during the mission at second longer?
The reason it's important to make a big deal out of misleading or just plain false information put into the media is that once it's out there, it forms opinions and never comes back. You don't get to re-do the first impression. There are lots of people who still think that Joe Wilson proved that Bush lied in his state of the union speech regarding Iraq seeking to obtain uranium. The damage done by a lie told widely in the media is nearly impossible to erase or correct. That's why it's important to make a huge stink whenever it happens and why it's important to constantly point out the ridiculous willingness of our mainstream media to blindly report/repeat falsehoods when it benefits the left.