Monday, May 22 2006

A Semi-correction

One of Brit Hume's favorite (and ridiculously petty) passtimes is scanning the "corrections" sections of major newspapers presumably to show just how "biased" they are to have made the acknowledged mistake in the first place. Take for instance, this report from the May 10th Grapevine:

Naming Names

The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dana Priest reports that "Army Lieutenant General Lee Blalack, a legendary special operations officer who now holds the title of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and warfighting support," is the driving force behind a campaign to expand the Pentagon's role in intelligence operations. Unfortunately, no such person exists.

The man Priest describes is actually Lieutenant General William Boykin, while Lee Blalack is, in fact, a Washington attorney who serves as disgraced California Republican Duke Cunningham's defense lawyer. The Washington Post has since issued a correction on its Web site.

On Wednesday's Grapevine, however, it was Brit Hume's turn to issue a correction.

Grapevine Correction

Last Thursday we reported that the USA Today story on the NSA's data mining of domestic phone calls waited until page five to mention that customers' names, addresses and other personal information are not collected as part of the program. In fact, that information appeared on the front page in the 11th paragraph. We regret the error.

Now, I've got to say that it's rather puzzling how Hume or Hume's staff could have made such an elementary mistake, unless they hadn't actually read the paper edition of USA Today itself. In that case, however, one wonders how it was that they concluded that the information in question did not appear 'till page 5. Hmmmmm. Puzzling indeed.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting that Hume's "correction" is really more of a pseudo-correction. For as brithumewatch noted earlier, the biggest problem with Hume's report is that it was tremendously misleading in suggesting that the information gathered by the NSA could not be matched to specific individuals, and that USA Today, for some reason was trying to hide that fact. Indeed, the opposite is true, and Brit Hume has offered no correction in this regard.

(Update: MediaMatters.org has been following this story, too and has some more interesting information to add. The "page 5" error, for insatance, resulted from the fact that USA Today printed the information in question on Page A1 and Page 5... absurd, isn't it?)