Apparently Erroneous Reporting About Allegedly Erroneous Reporting

Jake Tapper, now of CNN but a bulldog for truth while at ABC News, is getting lots of love from the left for debunking a bit of the Benghazi talking points story. His gist - the summaries of the emails put forward by ABCNews and the Weekly Standard exaggerate (to the point of invention) the mention of State Department concerns by the White House as a topic needing to be addressed.

However, there is trouble in their Blue Heaven: Tapper's summary of the Weekly Standard is wrong and somewhat misleading. Here is Tapper:

The Weekly Standard reported that Rhodes "responded to the group, explaining that Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning." Nuland refers to then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

But that is not what Stephen Hayes reported in the article linked by CNN; instead, he wrote that as a follow-up the the ABC news reports. The relevant passage from the original Hayes reporting is here (p. 2), with my emphasis:

But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy. The changes, she wrote, did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership,” and State Department leadership was contacting National Security Council officials directly. Moments later, according to the House report, “White House officials responded by stating that the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into account.” One official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser to President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House.

So per Hayes, his info is coming from a House report (Republican side). Other White House officials said that the State Department concerns would be addressed. And Ben Rhodes, who wrote his now-controversial email at 9:34 PM, just after the Nuland email, is alleged by Hayes to have said what CNN is now reporting: 

"...further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House."

Baffling. To compound the mystery, CNN presents what looks like a direct quote from the Hayes piece, but the passage does not appear in the linked Weekly Standard article. However, the phrase does appear in a different Hayes piece which was written as a follow-up to the ABC scoop.

If Hayes was right (or at least, unsure) the first time in describing what Rhodes wrote and wrong following ABC News then we should look to ABC for the problem. Here is how Karl described their sourcing for the emails:

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

So ABC implies they had access to more emails than were reported by Stephen Hayes. Eventually, Karl writes this:

After the talking points were edited slightly to address Nuland’s concerns, she responded that changes did not go far enough.

“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings leadership,” Nuland wrote.

In an email dated 9/14/12 at 9:34 p.m. — three days after the attack and two days before Ambassador Rice appeared on the Sunday shows – Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email saying the State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed.

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.  We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

Karl's quote includes a specific mention of the State Department; the new, selectively released email from CNN does not. What gives?

In a follow-up today, Karl tries to explain:

This is how I reported the contents of that e-mail, quoting verbatim a source who reviewed the original documents and shared detailed notes...

The source was not permitted to make copies of the original e-mails. The White House has refused multiple requests – from journalists, including myself, and from Republican leaders in Congress – to release the full e-mail exchanges.

...

I asked my original source today to explain the different wording on the Ben Rhodes e-mail, and the fact that the words “State Department” were not included in the e-mail provided to CNN’s Tapper.

This was my source’s response, via e-mail: “WH reply was after a long chain of email about State Dept concerns. So when WH emailer says, take into account all equities, he is talking about the State equities, since that is what the email chain was about.”

The White House could still clear up this confusion by releasing the full e-mail transcripts that were provided for brief review by a select number of members of Congress earlier this year. If there’s “no ‘there’ there,” as President Obama himself claimed yesterday, a full release should help his case.

Jake Tapper has a good reputation for being tough on the White House, so there was a certain craftiness in selectively releasing one out-of-context email to him to make the White House case. However, I doubt he will play the patsy here - if context counts then Tapper will join the cry for a more complete release of the emails.

And for my money, if Nuland of State is complaining at 9:24 and Rhodes is responding ten minutes later, it is hardly a stretch to think he was responding to Nuland.

MORE: Ace pounds the table about "doctored" emails, forcefully reminding people who shouldn't need reminding that ABC News and Stepehn Hayes were working off of summaries of the emails, not source documents. J Karl of ABC News is crystal clear in his follow-up; his original story opened the door to confusion with this:

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.

What? ABC News reviewed them? A few paragraphs later we get this:

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

Well, was it summaries, source documents, or both? Karl was blurry in round one.

Comments

[Gus]

Rocco, have you ever fished Quabbin at midnight with a bunch of Pakistani pals? I wonder if our Paki-pals had flashlights so they could do their amateur midnight engineering.

[MikeHggns]

Yeah, but it WAS all BS and she WAS lying: Washington Post: "An insider account of the creation of the Benghazi talking points"

[Stephanie]

I don't frankly think I've always been treated with a great deal of respect

Fixed it for him although...

I don't frankly think. I've always been treated with a great deal of respect.

would have worked, too.

[Stephanie]

Frack... the strikethrough didn't take on the first quote.... alas and alack.

[centralcal]

Well, isn't this interesting.

White House executive staff visit website in "record numbers" at EXACTLY the same time that IRS visits to same website spike.

The analytics show 60 unique visitors and 84 page views to Watchdog.org from eop.gov, the Executive Office of the President, between December 2009 and May 2013.

[centralcal]

Ugh. POTUS to take over our airwaves at 6 PM ET to talk about IRS scandal.

[pagar]

http://cnsnews.com/blog/mike-ciandella/soros-gave-61-million-groups-linked-pressure-irs-target-conservative-nonprofits

And people wondered why the IRS jumped?

[Janet]

Breitbart has a post about Gibson Guitars & Boeing. I can't do links anymore.

[Abu-ibn-AlJack (Tea Party Taliban)]

That lady, Larsen, is the head to roll. But not the only one. It never works like that.

[The Infamous Ignatz]

--Yes, thank you Rob, EPA - and they shared info on farmers and ranchers with enviro groups per that April report that Janet linked.--

The truly evil thing is they illegally shared info in February and when the people harmed complained, rather than fix it, EPA illegally shared even more info again on others.
I'd link the story but, well, you know.

[Rocco]

Gus

Chemical engineering students at that.

[Abu-ibn-AlJack (Tea Party Taliban)]

Emails? Only 100? Selective?

So far they are devastating. And Guess who just showed up as editor-in-chief? You guessed it. John Brennan!~

Hey!

Even Silva couldn't do better with this plot.

[Abu-ibn-AlJack (Tea Party Taliban)]

Okay, give it to Lew. Acting Commish is defrocked. Easy. Safeguards? Lets use the system we have proven in Chicago.

Congress needs to fix this. Not me. Hear that Boner. Its your problem not mine and its fixable so no excuses.

[narciso]

Looking forward to the next one in the series, JiB, in film references, one recalls Fred Thompson was the CIA director who was crafting intelligence to support a giant stealth sub, in No Way Out

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/15/PolitiFact-Obama-Claim-Benghazi-Thoroughly-Reviewd-Pure-Fiction

[Jeff Dobbs]

centralcal:
Ugh. POTUS to take over our airwaves at 6 PM ET to talk about IRS scandal.

Not, ugh, yay! That Obama still thinks he's persuasive and just needs to cowbell the teleprompter is welcome.

::he says in the comfort of *not* being a network or cable news watcher::

::while thinking to himself, everyone these days has remote controls for their tvs, right?::

[henry]

everyone these days has remote controls for their tvs, right?

my TV has a dial. The stupid HDTV box the govt made me buy has a remote for switching channels.

[centralcal]

Well, hit - YES one does have a remote control, however on a busy news night to take over the time slot for nearly all news programs, deliberately show up 20 minutes late - I am sure is to keep some control of the news output - at least for one night.

[cathyf]

What criminal laws have these IRS thugs violated?

That is an interesting question. Today's Taranto brings up a particularly troubling example.

Anne Hendershott, a professor at The King's College in New York, listened to the voices. She even repeated what some of them were telling her in a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing self-described Catholic organizations that were campaigning for ObamaCare.

TheBlaze.com reports that the IRS selected her for an audit in 2010.

...

She suspects she was targeted for articles she wrote about ObamaCare:

"I started writing articles like crazy saying these are fake Catholic groups," she said of the aforementioned organizations, noting that Korzen would often target her work and rail against her assertions.
Hendershott noted that the progressive leader once called into a radio show she appeared on to challenge her contention that he had accepted Soros money.
"I had the tax return in front of me and read off the amounts that Chris Korzen was getting paid from Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good--a Soros supported fake Catholic group," she told TheBlaze, noting that, through Catholics in Alliance, he had received $85,000.
While Korzen denied this on the air, Hendershott read from the 990 form in an effort to prove he wasn't telling the truth. This, she believes, may have sparked--or played a role--in spawning the IRS audit.
"He was getting paid by one organization and working for another," the professor said of Korzen. "The IRS should have gone after them."

Instead the IRS went after her. That's what happens when you listen to those voices. "Her writings for the Catholic Advocate soon ceased because, Hendershott admits, the IRS audit silenced her."

This is utterly chilling. Catholics get in wild shouting matches and accuse each other of heresy all the time. Having the IRS take a position on an essentially intramural religious argument is stunning. What's next? Is the IRS going to take away the Church's tax exemption if it denies communion to pro-abortion politicians? Because it refuses communion to people who are divorced and remarried?

So to return to DoT's question, what law would it violate? Does the First Amendment really mean anything?

[Corn-fed conservative (southern strategy version)]

I'm sure the linchpin Law which was violated was the Scalia Law.

[Janet]

What's next? Is the IRS going to take away the Church's tax exemption if it denies communion to pro-abortion politicians? Because it refuses communion to people who are divorced and remarried?

I believe that is already being tested. Not too long ago there was a "news" story about a lesbian woman being denied communion at her mother's funeral.
ABC news, Huffpo, WaPo, US News, USA Today,MSNBC,...

I sometimes think of these victim stories as trial balloons....or getting the public to feel bad for this woman against the "mean" Catholic Church. If a lot of these stories are put out..& they play well...then it's on to a poll. 75% of Americans think Catholic Priests are mean to Lesbians!

No theology. No understanding of Catholic Church teachings or the Bible.

[Janet]

I'll be! That one went through!

[cathyf]

Not too long ago there was a "news" story about a lesbian woman being denied communion at her mother's funeral.

Ok, that story is a little more complicated, Janet. The basic facts... On the day of this woman's funeral, the woman's out-of-town family shows up and is in the church beforehand. The priest, who has just met them, asks the woman's daughter who the other woman was who was helping them, and the reply was that "she is my partner." The next thing that happened is that he turned her away in the communion line.

-- what if the woman introduced as the "partner" was a business partner? (We know from Jane how confusing that can be!)

-- what about when the priest gets confused and the dead woman's "daughter" was actually her son and "her wife" was, well, his wife? Back when SNL was funny there were lots of wicked funny "Androgynous Pat" skits that exploited just that problem.

The problem was that the priest had just met these people a few hours before, and the conversation which supposedly identified them as a lesbian couple was short and ambiguous, and what he was interpreting as defensiveness and belligerence could just as easily been one of the weird ways people act when they are grieving. You don't go denying people communion unless you are damn sure of what the situation is.

(In my parish we have one of those large extended multi-generation families where the grandparent generation has 8 siblings. One of those died a few years ago, and his granddaughter is a teenager who has down's syndrome. Everyone in our church knows her, she is quite high functioning, and she made her first communion when she was in the second grade. The brother of her grandfather -- her great-uncle -- is also a member of the church. The great-uncle's wife, who is not Catholic, has a sister in her 50's who has down syndrome. Their mother died a couple of years ago, and so she spends many weekends with her sister and brother-in-law, and of course comes to church with them on Sunday.

Ok, so that's the back story... We had a priest who had been in the parish for a year or two, and he asked the great-uncle who the woman with downs syndrome is. He explained that it was his sister-in-law, and that his mother-in-law had recently died, and so she spent lots of time with them now. And, no, like his wife, his sister-in-law is not Catholic.

You all can probably guess where this is going... The priest got confused between the 50-something 4.5-ft tall mongoloid woman and the 14-yr-old 4.5-ft tall mongoloid woman, and when the girl came up in line with the rest of her family at communion he refused her communion. When questioned later by the bewildered family, the response was, "I asked Dave, and he told me that she isn't Catholic." This was really confusing -- why would her great-uncle tell the priest that she wasn't Catholic? She was baptized, made her first communion, was confirmed in this church! They finally figured out that the priest had confused the two women. The worst part was that the priest continued to maintain that this was all Dave's fault and he had done nothing wrong.

So very very first rule of denying someone communion -- you better be damn well sure that who know WHO the person is in front of you. The bishop in Washington suspended the priest because he refused communion based upon completely inadequate information. Especially when dealing with total strangers who are under a lot of stress and not necessarily thinking about how how a certain turn of phrase might be misconstrued. In Catholic theology, taking communion when you shouldn't is totally on the shoulders of the person presenting for communion. Yes, when the priest has complete and sure knowledge of a situation, THEN he can deny communion. But he better be damn sure he's got the right person!)

[fundamental get good life considering bringing beats by dre uk - posted by keslia at Tweep]

JustOneMinute: Apparently Erroneous Reporting About Allegedly Erroneous Reporting fundamental get good life considering bringing beats by dre uk - posted by keslia at Tweep http://tweep.fr/blogs/post/551