WhatFinger

The Post issued an apology that was far more complete than what Matthews had done and dinged Flock for not doing her research.

Washington Post Also Apologizes for Story Linking Romney to the KKK

By Don Irvine ——--December 29, 2011

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Just over two weeks ago Chris Matthews apologized on his Hardball program for an earlier report on MSNBC that erroneously linked a slogan in a Mitt Romney video to the KKK.
That report was rife with mistakes and relied heavily on information provided by the left-wing blog, AmericaBlog. But MSNBC wasn’t the only news organization caught by AmericaBlog’s lies. It turns out that The Washington Post also reported the same information in their blogPost section written by Elizabeth Flock.
Flock used the misinformation to accuse the Romney campaign of not doing its research when in fact she didn’t bother to check out the accuracy of the story herself and instead relied on a left-wing blog for her information. The Post issued an apology that was far more complete than what Matthews had done and dinged Flock for not doing her research.
Editors’ note: This posting contains multiple, serious factual errors that undermine its premise. Mitt Romney is not using “Keep America American,” which was once a KKK slogan, as a catchphrase in stump speeches, as the posting and headline stated. In a YouTube video that the posting said showed Romney using the phrase, Romney actually used a different phrase, “Keep America America.” Further, the video that the blog posting labelled “Mitt Romney 2012 Campaign Ad” is not actually a Romney campaign ad. The video itself states “Mitt Romney does not actually support this ad.” The posting cited accounts of Romney saying “keep America American” at an appearance last week. Independent video from the event shows him saying “Keep America America.” The Post should have contacted the Romney campaign for comment before publication. Finally, we apologize that the posting began by saying “[s]omeone didn’t do his research” when, in fact, we had not done ours.
As I said in my earlier blog post on the matter, savor the moment. The Post is not known for making corrections of this magnitude, but in this case they really had no choice as Flock’s blog post got it completely wrong when it came to Romney. Flock is still blogging for the Post, but hopefully her editors will be keeping a much closer eye on her in the future.

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Don Irvine——

Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and its sister organization Accuracy in Academia. As the son of Reed Irvine, who launched AIM in 1969, he developed an understanding of media bias at an early age, and has been actively involved with AIM for over 30 years.

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