ABC, Tapper Dig In On Piece Reporting Falsely That Bill Clinton Said He Wants To Slow Our Economy
January 31, 2008 -- 6:19 PM EST // //
I hate to pile on, but this is just unreal. As you all know by now, ABC News' Jake Tapper has been taking a pounding all over the place for this piece, which led by quoting Bill as follows...
"We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren."Four minutes after it was posted, that piece produced this headline on Drudge, who is apparently a very close reader of Tapper's blog...
Bill Clinton: 'We Just Have to Slow Down Our Economy' to Fight Global Warming...Pretty startling -- A leading Dem wants to "slow down" our economy? Well, as everyone else has shown by now, the full context of the quote showed that Bill was making the opposite point. This quote was cherry-picked in a startlingly questionable way to produce the story that Drudge seized on. Everyone has already done the work on this: Just go read Steve Benen's post to read the full quote.
Now Tapper has defended himself in a new post. He rightly points out that he himself produced the full context lower down in his original post and linked to video of Bill's speech. Tapper continues that he did this because he "wasn't sure" what Bill meant: "That's why I provided the video links, the full quote, and gave a number of options as to what he meant," Tapper says.
But come on. The problem here is the original cherry-picking of the quote and the printing of it high up and out of context, which was highly questionable and indeed created a story that simply isn't true.
Tapper knows full well how the freak show works. He had to know perfectly well that yanking that quote out of context and injecting it into the bloodstream in that form would make it true that Bill said that, no matter how much context and video he added later in the piece. But he did it anyway. Indeed, the Republican National Committee has already sent out a release attacking Bill for the cherry-picked quote.
What's more, ABC is still sticking to this bogus shading of the story to make news. This headline is still on the ABC News politics page:
Bill Clinton: Slow Economy To Save PlanetYep -- Bill wants to slow our economy. Sorry -- he said those words, and because they were quoted in isolation, this will be true forever.
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