Alaska Party Official Says Palin Was Not a Member (NYT retracts!)

[Wretched Excess]

of course, they buried this in their blogs, when the smear was on page one.

Alaska Party Official Says Palin Was Not a Member

The chairwoman of an Alaskan political party that advocates a vote on the state’s succession from the union said Tuesday that she had been mistaken when she said Gov. Sarah Palin was a member of the group.

A front-page story in The New York Times on Tuesday and articles in other news media reported that Ms. Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party for two years in the 1990’s.

The information in the Times article was based on a statement issued Monday night by Lynette Clark, the party’s chairwoman, who said that Ms. Palin joined the party in 1994 and in 1996 changed her registration to Republican.

On Tuesday night, Ms. Clark said that her initial statement was incorrect and had been based on erroneous information provided by another member of the party whom she declined to identify. The McCain campaign also disputed the Times report, saying that Ms. Palin had been registered consistently as a Republican.

After checking the party’s archives, Ms. Clark said that she could find no documentation that Governor Palin had been a member of the party. She said Ms. Palin attended the party’s 1994 and 2006 conventions and provided a video-taped address as governor to the 2008 convention.

More

[jinxmchue]

of course, they buried this in their blogs, when the smear was on page one.

Of course they did!  That's what these lying left-stream, Obamessiah-fellating jackasses do.

[Wretched Excess]

the reporter stands by the story that the NYT retracted last night, and that her source now claims is innacurate.  the response
from the mccain campaign:

Bumiller Stands By Her Story...After Paper Retracts

Yesterday the New York Times ran a front-page story by Elisabeth Bumiller that was riddled with factual errors. Among them was the assertion by Bumiller that Governor Palin "was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party." There was no evidence offered to support this statement, and as this campaign pointed out, it is untrue. Now the Times reports:

    The information in the Times article was based on a statement issued Monday night by Lynette Clark, the party’s chairwoman, who said that Ms. Palin joined the party in 1994 and in 1996 changed her registration to Republican.

    On Tuesday night, Ms. Clark said that her initial statement was incorrect and had been based on erroneous information provided by another member of the party whom she declined to identify.

Just to be clear, Bumiller asserted as fact what turns out to have been an "incorrect" statement by a single, unidentified source. Given that the story appeared on the front-page of this country's 'paper of record,' we might be forgiven for expecting a slightly more rigorous standard of reporting, yet Bumiller makes no apologies. Howard Kurtz reports in today's Washington Post:

    Elisabeth Bumiller, the lead author of the Times report, said she is "completely confident about the story." As for the campaign's criticism, she said: "This is what they do. It's part of their operation."

She is completely confident in the word of a single source who has since retracted her claims? What kind of operation are the editors at the Times running?

Link

[jinxmchue]

An anonymous critic of me and my blog inadvertently pointed something out to me: the material posted in the Times blog is, in fact, not a retraction.  A retraction would've involved the Times admitting error (like not vetting their source better) and apologizing to Gov. Palin.  Neither happened, so it's not a retraction.

[Wretched Excess]

An anonymous critic of me and my blog inadvertently pointed something out to me: the material posted in the Times blog is, in fact, not a retraction.  A retraction would've involved the Times admitting error (like not vetting their source better) and apologizing to Gov. Palin.  Neither happened, so it's not a retraction.

and that would have required journalistic ethics.  that was probably just a "correction", or an obamaesque "clarification". 

while the times is hiding behind formalistic style guidelines, it was actually the mccain campaign that called it a retraction.

whatever it was, it was incorrect.