Today…

Joshua Claybourn retracts an earlier post, reveals that his sources work in Sen. Santorum’s office and calls on the media to heed his example:

I publicly apologize for posting unfounded accusations, and I hope ABC News and the Washington Post follow my lead.

La Shawn Barber is sympathetic, Eric Ragle gets preachy and Michelle Malkin offers an idea:

If Claybourn really believes he has been hoaxed, there is nothing preventing him from publishing his sources’ phone numbers.

Also, Howard Kurtz reports:

The Post’s Allen said “the blog interest has been stoked by secondhand accounts” that the paper’s story referred to Republican talking points. “We simply reported that the sheet of paper was distributed to Republican senators and told our readers explicitly that the document was unsigned, making clear it was unofficial,” he said. “We stuck to what we knew to be true and did not call them talking points or a Republican memo…”

If that’s true, the Washington Post should have made the distinction clear and explained that the source who passed the memo to them, ABC, was reporting this wrong. Don’t blame the blogs; we certainly weren’t the first to use the term “GOP Talking Points.”

As Malkin writes,

The Post is less culpable, but its second article about the memo (not the original article co-authored by Mike Allen) implied the memo was drafted and/or circulated by Republicans.

Clear reporting by the Washington Post would have prevented the media swarm that followed, with Good Morning America and Hardball and local editorials all around the country using it to bash Republicans.

Back to the Kurtz quote:

“The document was provided by an official who has a long record of trustworthiness, and this official gave a precise account of the document’s provenance, satisfying us that it was authentic and that it had been used in an attempt to influence Republican senators.” Allen said that under the journalistic ground rules, he could not say whether the source was a Democrat or a Republican.

Let me get this straight. The memo is both “unofficial” and “authentic,” and the source is both “trustworthy” and anonymous…

So we reported this because?

A Democratic Senate official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the party is not publicly discussing the memo’s origin, said: “It’s ridiculous to suggest that these are some talking points concocted by a Democratic staffer. The fact is, these talking points were given to a Democratic member by a Republican senator.” Democratic aides, in turn, gave the memo to reporters, as the New York Times reported last week.

Well that’s a bit more than we’ve been told before, but my anonymous source still says you’re full of crap.

This is a non-story spread by non-entities about a non-official memo to a bunch of know-nothings in the media, and nothing more.

UPDATE: How does that old saying go, “if a tree falls in the woods…?”

So if an error-filled, unsourced, unofficial memo is “passed around in the Senate,” but nobody reads or even receives a copy of it except for Democrat staffers and reporters, does it make a sound?

Apparently it does. Thanks, ABC!

UPDATE: Powerline returns with ““Talking Points Story Goes Up In Smoke” and leaves me wondering something.

Of course, the fact that the memo was distributed to some Republicans, just as it was distributed to some Democrats and some reporters, was never in doubt. The questions are: 1) where did it come from, and 2) was it distributed by Democrats as a dirty trick? On these points, ABC now professes complete agnosticism.

In fact, however, ABC did not report the memo as claimed by Schneider. Both on the web and on television, it was specifically described as a “GOP talking points memo.” That characterization has been picked up and repeated by countless other news organizations and columnists, and ABC’s belated recantation is highly unlikely to be similarly publicized.

If ABC and the Washington Post are now “disavowing any claim that the alleged ‘talking points memo’ was authored by a Republican, let alone that it was some kind of official Republican strategy memo,” why can’t we give it a new name based on their own standard?

Why can’t we call it the “ABC Talking Points Memo”?

ABC distributed the memo; we know that because of the Washington Post report.

ABC read it, distributed it, reported it and posted it to their website.

By ABC’s own standard, it clearly must be an “ABC Talking Points Memo.”

Powerline should have the last word:

An anonymous Democratic Senator tells us that an anonymous Republican Senator gave the document to an anonymous Democratic Congressman, who passed it on to anonymous Democratic aides, who gave it to reporters. That certainly clears up any doubts about the memo! And, oh, by the way, where did the Repuublican Senator supposedly get the memo? From a Democratic staffer? A reporter? A lobbyist? Who knows?