A little more unfinished business on the Drudge/Clark smear.
As I’ve already told you several times yesterday and today, Drudge got hold of some quotes from Clark’s September 26th, 2002 congressional testimony and distorted them out of recognition by highly selective quotation.
In a subsequent post last night I quoted a passage from a piece which ran on the KnightRidder newswire. Here’s the passage …
Clark’s congressional testimony was further distorted Thursday by cyber-gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who quoted selected portions of Clark’s testimony and added sentences that don’t appear in the transcript on his Web site Thursday. Drudge didn’t respond to an e-mail request for comment.
Now, I figured the authors of the piece had done their homework on this one, particularly the point claiming he had “added sentences that don’t appear in the transcript.” But it seems that that’s not quite true. Drudge did something almost as bad, but not quite.
With the help of TPM’s crack editorial assistant Zander Dryer we compared the Drudge quotes with the ones in the actual transcript.
By our read, all but one was right there in the text. And we assume the one they’re referring to is this one …
There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat… Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He’s had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001… He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn’t have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we.
As we’ve reconstructed it, this is where it’s from …
There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat (p. 6)… Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He’s had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001 (p. 25-26–Clark is actually making the point that this posture gives us time to “work the diplomacy”)… he is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn’t have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we (p. 6).
This is a big <$Ad$>no-no. Ellipses (the dot, dot, dots) are one thing. But you don’t take ellipses out of their order when the reordering changes the meaning. However, that’s still very different from manufacturing quotes. And by our read, that wasn’t done.
Now, none of this changes the substance of the original point. This is more a house-keeping post. Drudge and various GOP chat-meisters and CNN anchors who followed his lead, cherry-picked a few quotes out of context and in so doing made Clark’s testimony seem almost the exact opposite of what it in fact was.
Still, we reprinted the clip of KnightRidder’s accusation. So we wanted to set the record straight.
(We’ve emailed the reporters. And we’ll let you know what we hear from them.)
Late Update: A number of readers have written in to say that they think that Drudge’s radical reordering of the order of Clark’s words is tantamount to manufacturing a quote. Thinking it over I’m half inclined to agree. In any case, I’ll let you be the judge.
