The dust has settled on the inaccurate email “summaries” that were passed off as real emails by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl and seemingly by CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson, and the result is that both news organizations have issued a pass for this basic journalistic breach. Jon Karl put out a statement, sanctioned by ABC News, expressing regret for his source’s error, and characterizing his egregious misrepresentation that he “obtained emails” as a matter of clarity. CBS News’ official position, as of this moment, is thatSharyl Attkisson’s reporting included a disclosure that the emails were not really emails, despite the existence of a memo demonstrating the opposite.
A week ago Friday, ABC News’ Jon Karl reported on emails that he, and other ABC News anchors, said he’d obtained, that purported to show the process involved in developing the talking points on the September 11 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Once CNN’s Jake Tapperactually did obtain a real email, and the White House subsequently released the actual email chain, Karl’s “emails” were revealed to be summaries, provided by a source, which contained invented quotes and significant omissions. Since then, both ABC News and Jon Karl have defended the reporting, and allowed only that Karl “should have been clearer about the attribution,” and that “ABC News should have been more precise in its sourcing of those quotes, attributing them to handwritten copies of the emails taken by a Congressional source.”
As any of Jon Karl’s colleagues, would likely tell you, the problem wasn’t a lack of clarity and precision in attribution, it was an overabundance of it. Jon Karl, and later, Martha Raddatz andReena Ninan, were very clear that Jonathan Karl had “obtained emails” and “unearthed emails.” It’s on video. Raddatz and Ninan might take a different view of Karl’s decision to implicate them in his false reporting. That ABC News and Jonathan Karl refuse to apologize for this sends the clear message that such a breach is acceptable to them, as long as the results pan out. If those Republican sources had taken better notes, we would never have known that Jon Karl falsely presented them as actual emails, and as a matter of policy, we won’t know the next time this happens, either.
CBS News, meanwhile, still has not corrected, or had their reporter correct, their own reporting on the email summaries, despite the fact that their own Chief White House Correspondent has reported on the significance of the discrepancies between the summaries that Sharyl Attkisson appeared to report as authentic emails, and the actual emails. On Friday, CBS News Spokesperson Sonya McNair told me that “Sharyl has impeccable sources and her reporting on this subject speaks for itself.”
No reason for a correction or an apology, then.
Over the weekend, however, Mediaite‘s Noah Rothman obtained an internal memo that indicated Attkisson had included a detailed disclaimer in an early draft, which was subsequently removed from the final product, either by Attkisson or someone else. That draft contained the following note: ...
The dust has settled on the inaccurate email “summaries” that were passed off as real emails by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl and seemingly by CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson, and the result is that both news organizations have issued a pass for this basic journalistic breach. Jon Karl put out a statement, sanctioned by ABC News, expressing regret for his source’s error, and characterizing his egregious misrepresentation that he “obtained emails” as a matter of clarity. CBS News’ official position, as of this moment, is thatSharyl Attkisson’s reporting included a disclosure that the emails were not really emails, despite the existence of a memo demonstrating the opposite.
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