The Tuesday, May 25th hard copy edition of the Argus Leader contains the following passage from a David Kranz report titled "Diedrich wants apology for 'Taliban' comment":
Johnson could not be reached for comment, but no apology will be forthcoming from the senator, said Julianne Fisher, Johnson's communications director.She said Diedrich and other critics needed to be aware of what Johnson went through in 2002 during his re-election campaign.
"This is certainly not directed at Larry Diedrich, but at the outside groups that came in two years ago and attacked his patriotism and his religious faith," Fisher said. "He has no intention of apologizing."
The reference was to an ad in the 2002 race against then-Rep. John Thune. A television ad compared Johnson to Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
(Emphasis added.) Now compare the bolded text above to that in the online version of the same story below:
Johnson could not be reached for comment, but no apology will be forthcoming from the senator, said Julianne Fisher, Johnson's communications director.She said Diedrich and other critics needed to be aware of what Johnson went through in 2002 during his re-election campaign.
"This is certainly not directed at Larry Diedrich, but at the outside groups that came in two years ago and attacked his patriotism and his religious faith," Fisher said. "He has no intention of apologizing."
The reference was to an ad in the 2002 race against then-Rep. John Thune. A television ad showed a picture of Saddam Hussein and criticized Johnson for votes in Congress against a missile defense system.
Obviously, the AL's editors corrected the story in order to be more accurate. Good for them. Here's the kicker, though. Neither the Wednesday edition of the AL, nor today's edition, make any reference to this correction in the AL's tiny "Corrections & Clarifications" column usually found on page A3 of every edition. This means that once the online edition of the story disappears into the AL's Memory Hole, the hard copy edition will live on as fact in the historical record, without there being any accurate correction to the story in the historical record. That is a serious oversight for a paper that touts its journalistic standards.
What's more, the text that was surreptitiously corrected by the AL's editors is a rather salient fact in the brouhaha regarding Senator Johnson's "Taliban" remark, particularly in light of a telling excerpt in Wednesday's edition of the Argus Leader by Dave Kranz titled "'Taliban' remark draws apology from Johnson":
"This was a flip remark at an informal gathering," Johnson said. "I should have been more precise about who attacked me without causing the confusion. In this case it was the Republican Senate Campaign Committee and their operative who came into South Dakota and ran the same ads against me that they did against Max Cleland."He said that ad campaign in 2002 was "a painful experience when my own son was in danger in combat at that time."
Johnson staff members were not able to identify the specific ad to which he was referring.
Ironically, this phantom ad comparing Johnson to Osama and Saddam that Johnson keeps referring to, and which his staffers cannot identify, is the ad Senator Tom Daschle cited as an example of the "startling meanness" in American politics in his speech a few weeks ago in Manhattan, Kansas. As DVT states, Johnson was never compared to Osama or Saddam. It never happened. To say there was such an ad is false, and, along with the fact that Daschle laughed and clapped as Tim Johnson made the "Taliban" comment, indicates that the Manhattan speech was a thorough exercise in cynicism.
The Argus Leader should prominently publish the correction they made in the online edition of the Tuesday story to an upcoming hard copy edition.
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