Power Line's Scott Johnson wrote a fairly complete summary piece in the Weekly Standard regarding the so-called 'GOP talking points' memo on Terri Schiavo. I did write to remind him of something missing from his report, the fact that the copy published by Raw Story contained corrections of the typos in the original memo. It's hard to imagine that a Republican staffer would issue a second edition of such a memo, with the corrections made.
Michelle Malkin notes that already one of the newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that received the Washington Post's original wire story citing "party leaders" as distributing the memo has issued a correction. That this wire story did come from the Post was verified by Howard Kurtz. He notes:
GOP congressional leaders say they never saw the document, whose author remains unknown. Post reporter Mike Allen, who was unaware the news service had distributed the earlier version, said last week that the paper was careful not to say it was "a Republican memo."
I understand that, in order to get information, the media need to have sources which occasionally remain confidential. But when those sources use the media to perpetrate a lie they should no longer remain confidential. They should have sacrificed that confidentiality by passing on the lie. This would help the media, in that they can give assurances that the source can remain confidential, if they did not knowingly lie.
In this fashion both sides would know what the stakes are. The confidential source would be reluctant to pass on speculation or fraud as fact, and the reporter would know, therefore, that what they are receiving should not only be accurate, but verifiable.
There's more today also from John Hinderaker.
My earlier posts on the situation:
UPDATE: Additional information from Michelle Malkin. It seems the Post does not want to suffer the ignominy of a correction. Won't it suffer more ignominy if they fail to correct, and the author and distributor is discovered to not be a Republican?
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