Monday October 27, 2008

SPOILED. How about that. I was just talking about how rightbloggers don't like to acknowledge their own errors, and a fresh example jumps out at me. Glenn Greenwald investigates a claim by National Review's Ed Whelan that the Washington Post failed to report Joe Biden's "international crisis" comments. Greenwald, using the clever expedient of the Washington Post's own search feature, discovers the quote in several Post articles.

Greenwald is understandably snarky in his report. Nonetheless you'd think Whelan, as a seeker after truth, would be grateful at least for the information. Instead, he flips out:

Never mind that I had done what strikes me as a sensible search (and one that should have yielded more results that Greenwald’s) and had expressly stated my lack of confidence in the reliability of the Post’s search engine. Never mind that, when informed by a reader that he recalled seeing the quote in the Post, I used his information to find one article and promptly (within an hour of my original post) added a correcting update. Never mind that the fact that the Post previously quoted Biden doesn’t detract from the strangeness of the “Impolitic” feature in this morning’s paper. Never mind that there are mountains of evidence of media bias in covering the campaign...

Etc. He also calls Greenwald "unhinged."

Like juvenile delinquents, these people have been shielded from the consequences of their actions for so long that when correction comes, they take it pathetically hard.