Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes that ABC News now claims that it corrected its story on the Iraq-anthrax connection way back on Nov. 1, 2001.
But as Greenwald notes, all ABC’s Brian Ross did on that date was say that the White House disputed the network’s reports that some of the anthrax could be traced to Iraq. That’s not new: ABC had included the White House’s denials in every one of its stories. Nor, according to Greenwald’s research, did ABC ever retract its stories or say that they were wrong.
Not good enough. ABC still needs to make a full accounting as to what went wrong.
More: Ross’ statements to TVNewser bring us closer. It may be that ABC’s big mistake was not making it clear at the time that it was retracting its stories. If that’s what it was doing.
And by the way: I should make it clear that I’m feeding on Jay Rosen’s posts on Twitter.
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I didn’t think there was much here– as you said, this wasn’t really part of the runup to the war, and Ross explained that there was no connection to Ivins.Kudos to Steve Krakauer of TVnewser for landing the interview– he’s 2 years out of college, and was able to get Ross to agree to an interview while the journoprofs couldn’t!But Ross did leave the door open:”The whole anthrax case is one of the things that would make for a good journalism class.”Ok, so invite Ross to provide the lesson plan at his leisure.