Major News Organizations are Covering Up the False Reporting by ABC's Jonathan Karl.

[GSI]

Original Story:
Jon Karl got played by a confidential source and now ABC News has a big
Benghazi problem
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146989n

From Yesterday (Saturday 5/18) Jay Rosen's "PressThink":
Jon Karl got played by a confidential source and now ABC News has a big
Benghazi problem
http://pressthink.org/2013/05/jon-karl-got-played-and-now-abc-news-has-a-big-problem/


A series of points, 1 to 8, goes over the now well known back-story.

POINT 9:
9. I had been following all this and last night I said on
Twitter: “Jon Karl got played. But he refuses to admit it.
Every ABC anchor who doesn’t ask him about it is complicit,
too.” I was anticipating Karl’s appearance on ABC’s
signature political program, This Week with George
Stephanopoulos. He had appeared on May 12th, two days after
his original report, to talk about Benghazi with guest host
Martha Raddatz. There had been big news in the intervening
week: the release of the original emails. I figured that ABC
News would have him on again, if they believed so strongly
in his original report. He is, after all, ABC’s Chief White
House Correspondent; the story that dominated Washington all
week was the re-emergence of a scandal narrative. A typical
headline: Obama Pivots to Jobs Tour at End of Scandal Filled
Week. (That’s from The Note, the politics blog at
ABCNews.com, to which Karl is a major contributor.) Well,
here’s the line-up for This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
No Jon Karl. Instead, ABC News Senior Washington
Correspondent Jeff Zeleny.

10. When a confidential source burns a reporter, a reporter
is within his rights to burn–that is, “out”–that source. But
it almost never happens because reporters are concerned that
potential sources will take it as a sign that the reporter
cannot be trusted to keep their names secret. That’s bad
enough. But this is worse. Karl had a chance to limit the
damage to ABC News from his faulty reporting when he first
responded to Jake Tapper’s report. He blew that.
Inexplicably, an ABC News spokesperson then doubled down on
Karl’s original reporting: strike two. They had a chance to
recover by asking Karl to explain how he got misled on This
Week. They blew that when they chickened out and asked Jeff
Zeleny to appear instead.

11. None of the major networks–ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN–has
an ombudsman. This is mystifying to me. They don’t seem to
realize that since the rise of the Internet, their reporting
is called into question far more easily and far more
effectively. This case was especially likely to blow-up in
ABC’s face once Jake Tapper’s report appeared online. When
one reporter pisses on another reporter’s scoop, the first
reporter enters a danger zone. The overwhelming temptation
is to defend the story and treat the critique of it by
another reporter as professional jealousy. A wise editor
would intervene. (Attention: Rick Klein.) That did not
happen. When the newsroom hierarchy fails, as it did here,
the ombudsman can step in and force an accounting. But there
is no ombudsman at ABC.

Jon Karl has dragged the entire news division at ABC (and
now George Stephanopoulos) into his self-dug pit. He got
played. His colleagues at other news organizations know it.
His friends at the network, were they real friends, would
try to talk him out of this disastrous state of denial.

Update, May 19. Today, Jonathan Karl, feeling the heat from
peers, decided to make a statement to Howard Kurtz of CNN,
who read it on the air. The statement says:

“Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I
regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which
still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the
attribution. We updated our story immediately.”

In the statement he did not apologize. On Twitter he did–
for failing to make clear that his reporting was based on a
summary provided by a source. My favorite part of his
statement is: “Clearly, I regret…” That’s exactly what he
and ABC News, through its spokesperson, were refusing to be
clear about!

See The Huffington Post’s report. Media Matters has many
more quotes from former journalists calling Karl’s actions
into question.

Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report, which tracks
television news, sends this:

On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, Major Garrett spelled out
how Jonathan Karl’s Republican source had misrepresented the
content of the e-mails in his Exclusive on the previous
Friday. But Garrett did not mention Karl by name as the one
who disseminated the falsity.

On Wednesday, when Karl covered the publication of the
actual e-mails by the White House on ABC World News, he
resorted to a post hoc, propter hoc sleight of hand to
suggest that they vindicated his previous reporting.
Garrett, also on Wednesday, reported the opposite: that the
relationship between the State Department’s comments and the
CIA’s wording changes were coincidental, not causative.

Per Garrett, the CIA redacted its talking points in response
to the FBI’s need not to compromise its investigation, not
in response to the State Department’s need to avoid
Congressional criticism.
-----------------------------------> End of PressThink article.

GSI:
I'll have more to say about this later. How the emails
in question came to be doctored, and by WHO, and
WHY, is a VERY BIG story.

[GSI]

On 2013-05-20 01:26:17 +0000, GSI said:

> Original Story:
> Jon Karl got played by a confidential source and now ABC News has a big
> Benghazi problem
> http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146989n
>

> Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report, which tracks
> television news, sends this:
>
> On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, Major Garrett spelled out
> how Jonathan Karl’s Republican source had misrepresented the
> content of the e-mails in his Exclusive on the previous
> Friday. But Garrett did not mention Karl by name as the one
> who disseminated the falsity.
>
> On Wednesday, when Karl covered the publication of the
> actual e-mails by the White House on ABC World News, he
> resorted to a post hoc, propter hoc sleight of hand to
> suggest that they vindicated his previous reporting.
> Garrett, also on Wednesday, reported the opposite: that the
> relationship between the State Department’s comments and the
> CIA’s wording changes were coincidental, not causative.
>
> Per Garrett, the CIA redacted its talking points in response
> to the FBI’s need not to compromise its investigation, not
> in response to the State Department’s need to avoid
> Congressional criticism.
> -----------------------------------> End of PressThink article.
>
> GSI:
> I'll have more to say about this later. How the emails
> in question came to be doctored, and by WHO, and
> WHY, is a VERY BIG story.

Jonathan Karl: A Right-Wing Mole at ABC News
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/a-right-wing-mole-at-abc-news/

Jonathan Karl and the success of the conservative media movement

Conservatives don’t just complain loudly, endlessly and
inaccurately about liberal media bias. They also train
right-leaning journalists to make their way into the
supposedly hostile terrain of Beltway media. And one of the
most famous alums of a conservative media training program
is now a major star at a network news outlet: ABC’s senior
political correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network,
an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting
right-leaning newspapers on college campuses (Extra!,
9-10/91)—such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous
James O’Keefe (Political Correction, 1/27/10). The network,
founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen
conservative ideology on college campuses. William F.
Buckley was the ISI’s first president, and the current board
chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery.
Several leading right-wing pundits came out of
Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh
D'Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham
(Washington Times, 11/28/04).

The Collegiate Network also provides paid internships and
fellowships to place its members at corporate media outlets
or influential Beltway publications; 2010-11 placements include
the Hill, Roll Call, Dallas Morning News and USA Today. The
program’s highest-profile alum is Karl, who was a Collegiate
fellow at the neoliberal New Republic magazine. After a stint
at the New York Post, Karl soon found his way to CNN, but he
was still connected to ideological pursuits; he was a board
member at the right-leaning youth-oriented Third Millennium
group and at the Madison Center for Educational
Affairs—which, like the Collegiate Network, seeks to
strengthen young conservative journalism. After moving to
ABC in 2003, Karl contributed several pieces to the neo-con
Weekly Standard, such as his April 4, 2005 article praising
Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as out to “make her
mark with the vigorous pursuit of the president’s freedom
and democracy agenda.”

Karl’s high profile at ABC demonstrates that conservative
messages can find a comfortable home inside the so-called
“liberal” media. Karl channeled former ABC corporate cheer-
leader John Stossel with a segment (3/5/11) complaining that
regulation of the egg and poultry industries was “almost
embarrassing,” since different government agencies regulate
different aspects of the industries. “Got that?” Karl asked.
“Fifteen separate agencies have responsibility for food safety.
” During the rollout of Paul Ryan’s budget plan, Karl (1/26/11)
gushed that the Republican media darling was “a little like the
guy in the movie Dave, the accidental president who sets out
to fix the budget, line by line.” And while Democrats were
saying Ryan “is a villain,” Karl was clear about which side
he was on: “Ryan knows what he sees.... Paul Ryan is on a
mission, determined to do the seemingly impossible: Actually
balance the federal budget.” (Actually, even with its
draconian spending cuts and absurdly optimistic economic
assumptions, the Ryan plan still foresees a cumulative
deficit of $62 trillion over the next half
century—Congressional Budget Office, 1/27/10.) On a This
Week roundtable (2/20/11), Karl declared that state budget
debates were “the Tea Party’s moment” and “also the Chris
Christie phenomenon. Will politicians be rewarded for making
tough choices—again, something I don’t think we’ve ever seen
happen?” Of course, it’s hard not to conclude that the
“tough choices” made by Christie and other Republicans are
the ones that ought to be rewarded. And in one World News
segment (2/14/11), Karl likened the federal budget to stacks
of pennies in order to demonstrate that deeper spending cuts
would be necessary in order to balance the budget. Karl
concluded that “the bottom line, Diane, is unless you’re
willing to talk about cutting entitlements or defense or
both, really, there’s no way you can even think about
balancing the budget.” This is not actually true—one could
raise revenues by increasing taxes on the wealthy—but it is
how Republicans want to frame the budget debate.

Perfectly unbalanced factchecking

Karl is often tapped by ABC to offer factcheck segments, and
the results frequently reinforce some of the misinformation
that is supposed to be corrected, or attempt to spread the
blame to “both sides.” During the debate over extending the
Bush tax cuts, conservatives complained that a tax increase
on the top 2 percent would actually be a crushing burden on
small business owners. Karl’s “factcheck” interviewed two
small business owners who claimed they would be adversely
affected. One said an increase in his personal tax bill
would cost him between $20,000 and $40,000, and the other
claimed a potential tax bill increase of $120,000. If these
estimates were true, Karl’s small businessmen were making
enormous amounts of money—upwards of $700,000 a year for the
first, nearly $3 million for the second (FAIR Action Alert,
9/13/10). That was never explained to ABC viewers. Karl’s
report, ironically enough, was supposed to be a “factcheck”
of Democratic claims that the tax cuts would not affect many
small businesses—about 2 percent. Karl finally admitted this
was true—and then made it sound less so: “894,000 small
businesses that would see their taxes go up. A small
percentage, but a large number of small businesses.” Karl
produced one factcheck (10/25/10) of political rhetoric
about the stimulus package. This would seem to be an easy
one; some Republican candidates were claiming that the
stimulus either created no jobs, or actually led to millions
of lost jobs—both of which, as Karl noted, were not true.
But due to the apparent need to create “balance,” Karl
followed that debunking by stating, “The most extravagant
claim related to the stimulus, though, comes from Harry
Reid.” What followed was a short soundbite of the Nevada
Democrat saying, “But for me, we’d be in a worldwide
depression.” Karl’s retort: “Hmm, maybe not.” Reid’s
comment, however, did not seem to refer to the economic
stimulus plan at all. It was drawn from an interview with
MSNBC host Ed Schultz (10/21/10), where Reid was talking
about the perils of campaigning in an economic downturn: “So
people have been hurting, and I understand that, and it
doesn’t give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you
know, ‘But for me, we’d be in a worldwide depression.’ They
want to know what I’ve done for them.” How Karl came to use
this quote as an example of stimulus extravagance is hard to
fathom, but it was prominently featured on right-leaning
websites like the Drudge Report. Though not billed as a
“factcheck,” Karl did something similar for a report on This
Week (4/3/11) about the budget debate. Tea Party activists
make unrelenting demands about spending cuts, explained
Karl—before pivoting to say: Democrats have their hotheads,
too. One Obama administration official said the Republican
bill, which cuts $5 billion from the Agency for
International Development would kill kids. That’s right:
Kill kids. What Karl considered hotheaded extremism was the
claim that deaths in poor countries will occur due to, among
other things, cuts to USAID’s anti-malaria programs. Others
will die because of a lack of life-saving medicines or cuts
in programs fighting infant mortality. That cutting health
aid to poor countries will cost lives, apparently, is a
claim only a “hothead” would make. Stimulus cop: looking for
pork!

One of the most frequent themes of Karl’s ABC reporting is
government spending. After the passage of the economic
stimulus bill, Karl set out to track potential signs of
wasteful “pork.” According to anchor Diane Sawyer (2/10/11),
“Jon Karl really is a Sherlock Holmes of waste in
Washington.” What he produced was a series of trivial
reports that seemed to mimic standard Republican complaints
about government waste: Two reports complaining about
Recovery Act signs (7/14/10, 7/10/09), a railroad/flood
prevention project in California’s Napa Valley “wine
country” (2/2/10), and small airports receiving government
funding (4/23/09, 9/18/09). In the midst of these reports,
Karl could go back to more mundane complaints about
government spending, which usually mean relying on
Republican politicians for your research: “For the past
week, [John] McCain has been twittering a daily top 10 list
of the bill’s porkiest projects,” Karl (3/4/09) reported
about a government spending bill. “Today’s top 10 includes
$150,000 for lobster research, $950,000 for a convention
center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.” A few months later
Karl wasn’t just reading McCain’s Twitter feed—he had a
downright “exclusive” from McCain and Republican Sen. Tom
Coburn. On ABC’s Good Morning America (8/3/10), Karl
outlined the Republican complaints, mocking the stimulus
bill for including “nearly $1 million for the California
Academy of Sciences to study exotic ants.” (How crazy to
study potential pest species—it’s not like California has a
$37 billion agriculture industry or anything.) On another
program (12/20/10), Karl derided a government “cow burp
study”—related to the trivial problem of global climate
change—while earlier he joked (6/16/09): “Why did the turtle
cross the road? Because $3.4 million in stimulus money
hadn’t been spent yet to build them a tunnel. But that’s
about to change.” It’s a timeless theme. “The bill is
supposed to fund government operations,” he explained on one
newscast (2/24/09) “but it includes things like more than $1
million for so-called ‘Mormon crickets’ in Utah, $200,000
for tattoo removal in Los Angeles and $443,000 to control
beavers in Mississippi.” If Republican congressional leaders
ever need someone to fill in on their PR team, Karl would be
a perfect fit. What’s striking about Jonathan Karl’s
reporting, however, is that it’s not flagrant Fox News-type
bias. Rather, Karl comes across as a somewhat exaggerated
version of the kind of Beltway center-right conventional
wisdom you’re likely to see on any network newscast. Perhaps
the lesson is that right-wing pressure to push the news
business to the right has been so successful, a conservative
movement plant fits right in.

[GSI]

On 2013-05-20 01:45:30 +0000, GSI said:

> What’s striking about Jonathan Karl’s
> reporting, however, is that it’s not flagrant Fox News-type
> bias. Rather, Karl comes across as a somewhat exaggerated
> version of the kind of Beltway center-right conventional
> wisdom you’re likely to see on any network newscast. Perhaps
> the lesson is that right-wing pressure to push the news
> business to the right has been so successful, a conservative
> movement plant fits right in.

I think this is MUCH BIGGER that a few right-wing moles in
major news organizations. Clearly, there is extreme pressure
from the very top powers of American Media to move news
reporting in the direction of FOX News, i.e. to be a propaganda
voice for the political Right-wing.
That means total support for a corporate-controlled America,
and total support for the agenda of Zionist Israel.
Practically speaking, this means the removal of Obama, and
the democratic administration, the total destruction of any
chance for Hillary Clinton to be elected. Then War in the middle
east, leading to the total destruction of Palestine, and it's
people, followed eventually by total war against the Muslim
world, all in the name of Jesus Christ, of course.