The Echo Chamber

A follow-up on Jake Tapper's fabrication of a Bill Clinton quote, which I mentioned Friday (call it a collage: Clinton actually did say those things, just not in the combination that Tapper reported) from billw at C&L.

Even though Tapper apparently watched that same video, he has since added in an update that he “wasn’t sure just what Clinton meant.” Now whether it is even possible for a journalist at ABC to be that stupid or whether he just continues to be deliberately misleading, I suppose that could be open to debate, but the problem is that now, days after Jake’s misleading piece had been thoroughly debunked and taken to task by blogs on the left and the right, the story unsurprisingly made it into the echo chamber where it was picked up by the likes of Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and now is showing up in publications with titles such as “Bill Clinton Wants An Economic Slowdown” and “Slow The Economy? Chill, Bill.”

Drudge, Limbaugh you'd expect to pick up on Tapper's trope -- I'm surprised Drudge didn't come up with it himself -- but ABC? Oh, wait . . . that's where it started. And now it's spreading. Like a virus. Of course, you can hardly expect Investor's Business Daily to be sympathetic to Bill Clinton, even though he implemented the first of the free trade agreements that have done so much for the American economy.

Of course, it's interesting to think about where this story would have gone if the blogosphere hadn't so thoroughly debunked it. It's early, though.