Regret the Error

Just after 11 this morning, Ben Smith posted an item on his blog at Politico.com stating that John Edwards would be "suspending his campaign" due to his wife’s cancer. Other media outlets, including Reuters,  also received the same tip, or cited Smith’s post in articles and on the air. Editor & Publisher has a story up and Smith has an apology and explanation here. CJRDaily.org also has a story up about it. From E&P:

…Outlets falling for it ranged from MSNBC to the
Washington Times, which headlined its story "Report: Edwards Suspending
Campaigning." This appeared shortly before his scheduled noon
announcement. The Los Angeles Times and Newsday were among many others
which also headlined the "suspension" on their sites.

The source for many of the reports was a blog item on
Politico.com. The author, Ben Smith, later admitted it was based on a
single source and he apologized.

But another source was Reuters, which also had
utilized a single source. ABC News’ web site, among others, picked it
up after 11 a.m. The Washington Post site carried the Reuters item with
the headline: "Edwards to suspend presidential campaign: source."

The Reuters dispatch, datelined Chapel Hill, N.C.,
began: "Democrat John Edwards is suspending his U.S. presidential
campaign, and may drop out completely because his wife has suffered a
recurrence of the cancer that sickened her in 2004, when she was
diagnosed with breast cancer, a Democratic source said on Thursday. ‘He
is going to be ending or suspending his campaign,’ said the Democratic
source in Iowa, adding Edwards had alerted some supporters in the state
of his decision. ‘The big mystery seems to be how serious Elizabeth’s
illness is.’"

C.W. Nevius, a blogger at sfgate.com, tweaked the
media performance with the headline: "The Story May Have Been
Incorrect, But We Had it First."

When Newsday corrected its story, it explained: "Early
Thursday, a person close to Edwards told Newsday that the former North
Carolina senator was choosing between suspending his campaign or
abandoning his effort altogether. But his campaign later denied the
story and Edwards told reporters he hadn’t ‘seriously’ considered
quitting."…

Smith’s apology:

A single, confident source close to John Edwards told me this
morning that Edwards was "suspending his campaign," and I posted it to
the blog at 11:06 this morning.
My source, and I, were wrong.
The source, whose anonymity I agreed to respect, spoke of the kind
of grim prognosis Elizabeth Edwards herself just described hearing
before a second round of tests came back. I trusted the source,
somebody I’ve known for several years, and who has always been reliable.
And with less than an hour before Edwards was to announce, I unwisely wrote the item without getting a second source.
When the campaign pushed back harder than I’d expected, I added that
information to the original item, but that doesn’t undo the damage.
My apologies to our readers for passing on bad information.

Here’s a correction from MSNBC.com:

On Thursday, March 22, MSNBC.com incorrectly reported that presidential
hopeful John Edwards would suspend his campaign because of his wife’s
recurrence of cancer. The report
was based on a statement an Edwards friend made to Politico.com, a
political Web site, and information from a source who spoke to NBC News. Link

UPDATE March 25: And we can add washingtonpost.com to the list. From a story by Howard Kurtz:

Well, The Washington Post’s Web site screwed up the John Edwards story, too.
For 51 seconds.
And it was an accident, of the cringe-inducing variety.
The Democratic presidential candidate had already announced
that he was continuing his campaign, despite the recurrence of his
wife’s cancer, when washingtonpost.com put up a headline at 12:32:20
p.m. yesterday: "John Edwards Suspends White House Bid."
By 12:33:11 it was down–replaced by "Edwards: Wife’s Cancer is Back"– but not because anyone had caught the mistake.
"You
don’t like a bad story on the Web site for one second or 51 seconds,"
said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. "It’s
embarrassing it got out there."
Especially embarrassing because I reported in The Post
yesterday that Politico.com and Reuters, each quoting an unnamed
source, had carried pieces that Edwards was going to suspend his
campaign before the former senator’s news conference in North Carolina.
The news was already out at the time of The Post’s online screwup.
Brady
said the Web site had prepared three different versions of the headline
and story summary–on Edwards suspending his campaign, dropping out or
staying in–so that it could move quickly once the candidate announced
his plans. Brady still isn’t sure how the mistake happened.
"It
was not an error of journalism," he said. "It was an error of
production . . . Nobody knows how it got up because nobody hit the
publishing button," Brady said…

 Report an error