Saturday, March 29, 2008

Being progressive means actually apologizing when you fuck up.


Now here's some irony. Very recently, progressive American blog ThinkProgress accused Sen. John McCain of lifting parts of a speech from someone else, in effect, committing plagiarism. Turns out they were wrong, for which ... oh, hell, let's just let you see how people with integrity handle it:

CORRECTION: As a blog that strives to maintain credibility and transparency, we would like to explain our mistake. When we were alerted to the tip that Adm. Ziemer gave a similar speech in 1996, we searched LexisNexis and McCain’s campaign site for whether the senator used the disputed phrases before that time. We did not find anything. After we published the post, the McCain campaign contacted us and pointed to a speech given by the senator in 1995, which appears on McCain’s Senate site. As soon as we were alerted to the error, we rushed to publish a correction. Once again, we regret the error, and we apologize for it...

UPDATE It appears that Ziemer's speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer -- in 1995. We regret the error.

In short, TP initially suspected plagiarism, tried to refute it, didn't find any disconfirming evidence, went with it, found out they were wrong, and went public with that. Whoops, our bad, won't happen again, case closed, right?

Wrong:

Right wing rejoices over ThinkProgress’ mistake.

The right wing has been jubilantly celebrating the fact that ThinkProgress made an error in claiming John McCain had plagiarized a speech by Adm. Timothy Ziemer. Drudge, Weekly Standard, National Review, and Instapundit have all referenced our mistake. On its “political grapevine” segment this evening, Fox News reported our error as well. Fox host Bret Baier said, “The left-wing blog ThinkProgress has had to eat its words.”

I trust I don't have to explain the overwhelming irony here.

5 comments:

LuLu said...

But, but, but ... Monica Lewinsky. Vince Foster. Obama hates white people. John Kerry was a flip-flopper. Al Gore is a big fat lying liar who lies ....

That guy said...

Which shows that what those right-wing media sites actually value is not getting caught and never admitting error.

Patrick Ross said...

...And sometimes, you deserve a good tasering.

Right, folks?

CC said...

And once again, Twatrick is unable to distinguish between statements of opinion and statements of fact.

What the fuck is the U of Alberta teaching these days? Can someone revoke their certification, please?

Patrick Ross said...

And once again, CC demonstrates why he's a hypocrite.

The fact of the matter is that, when Andrew Meier was unjustifiably tasered at a John Kerry speech, you essentially shrugged (this is a fact). But when Robert Dziekanski was unjustifiably tasered you said it was suddenly a bad thing (this is also a fact).

When called upon to explain yourself, you never retracted either statement.

Get it? Or am I using too many complicated words for you?