Well, better late than never I guess (and after Blue Virginia called them out for an egregiously bad article):An apology to PerrielloWell, I still think Perriello's comments were completely non-newsworthy, but it's nice to see The Politico's Glenn Thrush apologizing for what amounted to a smear job on Tom Perriello, not to mention shoddy "journalism."
A couple of days ago I ran an item on Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who appeared on MSNBC to talk about the town halls -- and commented that he had witnessed some racist comments over the summer.
The video, which had gone viral among conservatives, was sent to me by a tipster. I watched it, thought it was interesting, and began to transcribe the key parts. As I was transcribing, I got an email from a NRCC spokesman Andy Sere, who wanted to comment on it, appending what appeared to be a full a transcript of the exchange.
A time saver, I thought, so I cut-and-pasted. What I didn't immediately realize was that Sere had replaced key words -- that provided important context --with elipses. When the error was pointed out, I quickly fixed it.
[...]
I still think Perriello's comments are newsworthy but anyone who uses Sere's altered transcript instead of the unredacted version published here is intentionally misleading the public and should be called out for it.
P.S. I would hope that, after this, Politico reporters - and all reporters, really - will stop running anything from Andy Sere of the NRCC. The guy's obviously a devious and manipulative hack of the worst order.
P.P.S. I hope that graphic up top didn't "turn you gay," as Michael Schwartz - whose fine work Bob McDonnell cited in his thesis - would probably think. Heh.
