Henry Hanks sent me a link to a lengthy response from Salon.Com regarding freelance journalist Jason Leopold’s longwinded article claiming his story about Thomas White is indeed accurate that that he’s the subject of some New York Times/Salon.Com pro-Bush cabal. On the one hand, Salon.Com’s editors deserve some credit for being honest about their own bungling. On the other hand, well, they certainly are world class bunglers.
Leopold’s story included a lot of claims, but in the end it was the fact that Leopold claimed to have dug up an e-mail showing White ordering Enron insiders to cover up losses that separated his stories from other stories about White. Here was a smoking gun against White, courtesy of journalist Leopold.
The scary thing is, however, that Salon.Com did almost nothing to verify that the e-mail was genuine. They simple took Leopold’s word for it,
Our initial review of Leopold’s White story included detailed verification of many of the documents Leopold alludes to relating to Enron Energy Services’ Lilly and Quaker Oats deals. Nothing in our review then or thereafter has raised questions about the authenticity of those documents or the accuracy of Leopold’s reporting of them.
However, no Salon editor actually saw, before publication, the e-mail mentioned in the story — purportedly from Thomas White to a colleague, reading “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” We recognize now that this was a mistake, and we regret it.
Even that German magazine that fell for the Hitler diary hoax at least made sure that there really was some sort of diary before running a story on it. I just can’t believe Salon’s editors didn’t want to see that e-mail.
Anyway when the Financial Times accuses Leopold of plagiarizing seven paragraphs in his Salon.Com story from an FT story, Leopold apparently makes up a story that the FT actually plagiarized from one of his stories. The only problem is that the story Leopold claims he worte for Dow Jones doesn’t seem to exist, and Leopold digs himself in further by claiming that Dow Jones simply purged the story after he left (which the news service denies).
So now Salon’s editors demand to see the e-mail, and find a couple of problems.
As the questions surrounding the Dow Jones story began to multiply, we felt we had no choice but to review every aspect of Leopold’s original story for us, again. It was only at this stage of our investigation, Sept. 20, that Leopold finally provided us with the evidence supporting his story’s account of an e-mail from White. What he provided was a fax of a printout of an e-mail exchange. We noticed immediately that the wording on the e-mail — “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q” — was different from the wording in Leopold’s story (“Close a bigger deal to hide the loss”). When we published our correction notice concerning the Financial Times plagiarism on Sept. 23, we also corrected that wording, as we continued to investigate the e-mail itself.
The faxed e-mail contained no e-mail addresses or other headers, and that raised our concern, as did a published denial from White in a letter to the New York Times, where columnist Paul Krugman had picked up Leopold’s story. We told Leopold we needed to authenticate the e-mail. He told us the name of his source for it, and Lauerman told Leopold he was going to call the source to verify the e-mail. The source denied ever having spoken to Leopold.
So Salon’s editors finally call Leopold’s source who denies ever talking to Leopold. Leopold tells his editors not to worry since his cell phone records will show he called the source and talked to him. Leopold drags out sending the cell phone records and at one point has someone who supposedly works for his cell phone company join a conference call and list off numbers, dates and times for phone calls. But the numbers the company representative reads off are not the phone numbers to this source. And what happens when Leopold finally sends Salon his cell phone records (emphasis added),
When we reviewed this phone bill early Tuesday it contained numerous calls to the “other source” phone number (the same one the phone-service rep had cited the previous evening), but only one call to the number of the source Leopold originally named as the supplier of the White e-mail. The call was only one minute long, indicating that it was possibly unanswered, and in any case hardly long enough to conduct any sort of interview or obtain a fax of a sensitive e-mail. In any case, the call had taken place five days after Leopold had filed an early draft of the story that already quoted the e-mail.
Now that’s a neat trick — reporting on a source almost a week before actually talking to that individual.
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