1115.org

On Tuesday, I wrote about ThinkProgress ascribing a speech by Condi Rice to George Bush, an error that has now been fixed, but which stood uncorrected for a good long while.

Yesterday, they had another sloppy post about Condi Rice.

The headline reads: Report: Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims.

But the post only talks about an apparent lie by Gonzales on Rice’s behalf:

On January 6, 2004, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) on behalf of Condoleezza Rice that claimed the CIA had “orally cleared” the uranium claim for two of Bush’s speeches.

But in a new memo, House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that he has found evidence contradicting Gonzales’ assertions…

Nowhere in the post is there any mention of any lies by Condi.

As best as I can figure out, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked Condi Rice to provide examples of times that the CIA had cleared references to Saddam Hussein’s attempts to purchase uranium from Africa for use in speeches. Condi Rice declined to reply directly. Alberto Gonzales replied on her behalf, and his reply does not appear to uniquely comport with the truth.

I’m not sure how that becomes a lie by Gonzales and Rice. ThinkProgress does not explain.

They also had a sloppy post about George Bush. It claims that 56 percent of respondents to a Pew poll described Bush as “incompetence”, although the numbers in the table presented obviously add up to much more than a hundred, and the table clearly says it represents not percentages but “standardized numbers out of 1,000 responses”. That 56% is actually 5.6%. Which seems to materially change the whole meaning, doesn’t it?

Both these posts, incidentally, were by Matt Corley. Maybe he needs a vacation? Or just a good night’s sleep?

*** Update, 7:35 a.m. ***

The 56% error has been suddenly corrected this morning, without any indication that the post was edited/corrected. Not exactly in the “best practices” handbook to do it that way.

*** Update #2, 7:51 a.m. ***

In the Tuesday post referred to in the first para of this post, I had written:

I can’t imagine how ThinkProgress got it wrong (ascribing Condi’s speech to Bush), but I do find it interesting that when you click on the link in their post, it just takes you to an error message (typo in the URL, don’t you know?), so you would never find yourself looking at a headline reading “National Security Advisor Speaks at Texas A&M”.

The URL didn’t work because instead of reading “http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020408-6.html” the URL had an extra bit of html code stuck on at the end.

One, I can’t imagine how that html code could have ended up there. I can’t imagine any innocent cut-and-paste that would have produced that result. (Previous two paragraphs edited at 8:03 a.m. for clarity.)

Two, this URL has also been corrected without any acknowledgment of any change.

Three, I have never before had any reason to go back and look at ThinkProgress posts and see if they were changed ex-post, and if this was acknowledged. I am extremely taken aback at the fact that when I did it now for the three posts mentioned in this post, two of the three show unacknowledged ex-post changes. Needless to say, my confidence in the integrity and credibility of the ThinkProgress blog has dropped sharply.

When right-wing blogs behave like this, liberal blogs typically (and quite rightly) express outrage. It will be interesting to see if anyone else taxes ThinkProgress with unacceptable conduct. And whether ThinkProgress itself acknowledges this criticism and responds to it.

*** Update #3, 7:59 a.m. ***

I should point out that when the error ascribing Condi’s speech to Bush was corrected, that was duly acknowledged (even if it wasn’t time-stamped).

*** Update #4, 8:35 a.m. ***
This is brilliant. Now the headline on the Gonzales-Rice post has been changed from “Report: Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims” to “Report: Gonzales Appears To Have Lied To Congress For Rice About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims“.

Once again, without acknowledgment.