Be Skeptical About Political Journalism

The New York Times broke a shocking story:

Joe Ricketts, an up-by-the-bootstraps billionaire whose varied holdings include a name-brand brokerage firm in Omaha, a baseball team in Chicago, herds of bison in Wyoming and a start-up news Web site in New York, wanted to be a player in the 2012 election. On Thursday he was, though not in the way he had intended.

Word that Mr. Ricketts had considered bankrolling a $10 million advertising campaign linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., brought waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.

via Joe Ricketts Rejects Plan to Finance Anti-Obama Ads – NYTimes.com.

It seems Ricketts, an owner of the Chicago Cubs, started a Super-PAC to support Mitt Romney. One of the proposals put forward by a political operative was to associate President Obama with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his radical former pastor. Apparently, the proposal was “racially tinged.” So Ricketts and Romney are getting slammed accordingly.

But Mitt Romney has repudiated the tactic. Even more to the point, RICKETTS repudiated the ad. There is no ad! Ricketts refused to fund it. Not once it hit papers, at the time it was proposed! Somebody suggested doing this, but everyone said “no.”

So what is the story? There is no story.

It would be as if a reporter from Fox News was in a bar and overheard some drunk say, “I’m for Obama, and I gave his campaign twenty bucks! And I think the first thing he should do is kill all the capitalists!” The reporter then runs a story with the headline, “Obama supporter calls for killing capitalists.”