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30 Nov 2007 06:49 pm

National Review's Fabulist?

Read these two items, dropped into the blogosphere late on a Friday afternoon: Smith's defense and Lopez's editorial note. It's somewhat shady that Smith does not provide links in his apology to his original disputed stories, doesn't name or link to his critics, and appears, by his own account, to have reported events and facts that were actually relayed to him by anonymous sources as if he had seen them himself. Here's a flavor of the kind of issue involved:

Did I physically see and count 200 men carrying weapons? No. If I mistakenly conveyed that impression to my readers, I apologize...

On another matter:

This is a case where I should have caveated the reporting by saying that I only witnessed a fraction of what happened (from a moving car) ...

Hmmm.

I'll leave the follow-up to others. I'm not an expert in the area, and have only read the two posts linked above. As Smith and Lopez assumed, I'm headed home now for the weekend. But let's see if these reportorial exaggerations and alleged fictions get as much scrutiny in the right-wing blogosphere as the TNR Beauchamp contretemps. I'll be especially curious to see what Howie Kurtz and Glenn Reynolds do with the story. How many posts did the Corner have on two minor factual issues - still unresolved - in a TNR Diarist? How much preening and posturing has Reynolds done with respect to Beauchamp? And this is on a blog by a reporter still employed by NRO, with a long history of writing for the publication. For those interested in examining Smith's archive, it's probably a good place to start some more fact-checking. What goes around ... Or as Drudge would put it, developing ...

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