BREAKING: I didn’t win the Powerball yesterday!
In the evolving story of the “doctored” emails that ABC’s Jon Karl breathlessly injected into the Benghazi stupidity, it looks as though Karl has some right-wing bias issues. He’s not as bad as James O’Keefe, but one wonders where this man’s editors were.
In the same vein, Jay Rosen has written in some detail on how Jon Karl got played by his confidential source, and now he’s made ABC a problem too:
10. When a confidential source burns a reporter, a reporter is within his rights to burn–that is, “out”–that source. But it almost never happens because reporters are concerned that potential sources will take it as a sign that the reporter cannot be trusted to keep their names secret. That’s bad enough. But this is worse. Karl had a chance to limit the damage to ABC News from his faulty reporting when he first responded to Jake Tapper’s report. He blew that. Inexplicably, an ABC News spokesperson then doubled down on Karl’s original reporting: strike two. They had a chance to recover by asking Karl to explain how he got misled on This Week. They blew that when they chickened out and asked Jeff Zeleny to appear instead. #
Burning a source for setting you up would send a message to sources that you’d better be on the up and up, I would think. I don’t know how confidentiality of sources got to be more important than your sources not playing you.
The Guardian takes a good look at the first of America’s climate refugees. Newtok, Alaska is in the Western part of Alaska and is being destroyed by erosion and flooding. The town is rapidly sinking and Corps of Engineers thinks the town will be underwater in 4 years. This is the future of our coasts — perhaps not as fast or drastic as the disappearance of Newtok — but rising water will have some impacts. And even if you aren’t living right at the coast — you’ll be paying for whatever solutions there are to move/harden coastal areas.
And the NJ covers the latest adventures in family values by the local GOP — the lawsuit charging Vance Phillips with sexual assault.
What interests you today?