McConnell correction goes viral

Erik Wemple:

When the New York Times issues a correction, the New York Times issues a correction. The text attached to this Tuesday story by New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman is unequivocal. A mistake had occurred, it reported, in characterizing some quotes by Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Here’s how the Times correction reads:

Correction: April 9, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the target of criticism by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, as the Senate prepared to vote on legislation meant to close the pay gap between men and women. When he referred to “the left’s latest bizarre obsession,” he was criticizing Democrats’ attacks on David H. and Charles G. Koch, conservative billionaires whose political organizations have spent more than $30 million on ads so far to help Republicans win control of the Senate. He was not referring to the pay-equity issue.

That’s just one sample of a flurry of corrective — and somewhat less corrective — steps taken by news organizations over this very issue. At 1:40 p.m. yesterday, Sahil Kapur of TPM published a piece on this very matter, one that prompted a lot of aggregation around the Internet. It carries this note at bottom, which leaves room for more interpretation than does the New York Times’s treatment:

Clarification: This article initially attributed McConnell’s remarks to Democrats’ push on pay equity. His office contends that they were in reference to Reid’s comments about the Koch brothers. Reid discussed both pay equity and the Kochs in the floor speech McConnell was referring to.

In a brief chat with the Erik Wemple Blog, Kapur said, “The initial confusion was that Sen. McConnell didn’t specify whether he was referring to pay equity or the Koch brothers and his remarks don’t point to one issue or the other. “His office says it was about the Koch brothers, which I’m not disputing. I want to be transparent, and I really regret the confusion.” Here’s a draft of Reid’s remarks as prepared for delivery. They are heavy on anti-Koch content.

“As is crystal clear to anyone who actually read or heard his remarks, Senator McConnell was referring to an ‘attack’ that Senator Reid had made the previous day on two private citizens who disagree with him,” McConnell spokesman Brian McGuire said in a statement. “Only someone who believes that Senator Reid was ‘attacking’ pay equity could conclude that Senator McConnell was doing so himself.”

The Daily Beast piggybacked on Kapur’s piece in a brief mention on its “Cheat Sheet.”That item now features this sentence: “Talking Points Memo previously incorrectly reported that the ‘bizarre obsession’ referred to closing the gender wage disparity.”

The National Journal’s Lucia Graves dropped Kapur’s take into a piece on gender equity as a Democratic issue. It included this: “McConnell on Tuesday called Democrats’ push for action on gender pay equity a ‘bizarre obsession’ designed to blow “kisses to their powerful pals on the left,” as TPM’s Sahil Kapur reported.” That bit later disappeared from the story, without any accompanying explanation:

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