{"id":6629,"date":"2006-02-15T13:44:24","date_gmt":"2006-02-15T18:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6629"},"modified":"2006-02-15T13:44:24","modified_gmt":"2006-02-15T18:44:24","slug":"there-may-be-a-beer-or-two-in-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/there-may-be-a-beer-or-two-in-there\/","title":{"rendered":"‘There may be a beer or two in there’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The possible role of alcohol in the Cheney shooting has been widely discussed — just below the surface. Media outlets have reported<\/a> that the Texas sheriff’s office concluded that “there was no alcohol or misconduct involved in the incident,” which seemed to resolve the questions that many reporters had, but few were willing to touch.<\/p>\n

But there may be a little more to it. Ranch owner Katharine Armstrong told NBC News’ Aram Roston<\/a>, an investigative reporter, that Cheney and Whittington had a picnic lunch before going hunting and “there may be a beer or two in there.”<\/p>\n

NBC reported the quote and published it on MSNBC — until it was quietly removed from the site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what kind of standards are in place for these kinds of edits, but it seems incumbent on professional news outlets to explain<\/em> when a story is changed, particularly on substantive points like this one. If the quote was wrong, fine; amend the story and add an editor’s note with the correction. If Armstrong called and changed her mind about the quote, fine; just tell the reader about the switch.<\/p>\n

It’s wrong, however, for any news outlet to publicly report one thing and then pretend it was never said.<\/p>\n

This is an important story involving a vice president, who has had a few alcohol-related run-ins<\/a> with the law, and who delayed an interview with local law enforcement for nearly 14 hours<\/a> after the incident. If MSNBC is going to run a provocative quote, MSNBC needs to either stand behind it or explain the change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The possible role of alcohol in the Cheney shooting has been widely discussed — just below the surface. Media outlets have reported that the Texas sheriff’s office concluded that “there was no alcohol or misconduct involved in the incident,” which seemed to resolve the questions that many reporters had, but few were willing to touch. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}