ABC News And CBS News Officially Normalize Fabricated Reporting

by Tommy Christopher | 11:48 am, May 20th, 2013

The dust has settled on the inaccurate email “summaries” that were passed off as real emails by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl and seemingly by CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson, and the result is that both news organizations have issued a pass for this basic journalistic breach. Jon Karl put out a statement, sanctioned by ABC News, expressing regret for his source’s error, and characterizing his egregious misrepresentation that he “obtained emails” as a matter of clarity. CBS News’ official position, as of this moment, is that Sharyl Attkisson’s reporting included a disclosure that the emails were not really emails, despite the existence of a memo demonstrating the opposite.

A week ago Friday, ABC News’ Jon Karl reported on emails that he, and other ABC News anchors, said he’d obtained, that purported to show the process involved in developing the talking points on the September 11 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Once CNN’s Jake Tapper actually did obtain a real email, and the White House subsequently released the actual email chain, Karl’s “emails” were revealed to be summaries, provided by a source, which contained invented quotes and significant omissions. Since then, both ABC News and Jon Karl have defended the reporting, and allowed only that Karl “should have been clearer about the attribution,” and that “ABC News should have been more precise in its sourcing of those quotes, attributing them to handwritten copies of the emails taken by a Congressional source.”