Everyone makes mistakes. It’s not a crime for a reporter to have to make a correction to a story every so often. But isn’t Scott Horton past the point of reasonable error and deep into reckless territory? Today Adam White catches Horton deliberately misreading stories from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I don’t follow Horton’s work particularly closely, but this is the fourth time in the last nine months I’ve seen him botch basic journalism. To recap: * In October he published an account of Sarah Palin’s connection to the STANDARD which was one-part misreading of other stories and one-part pure fabulism. He published a correction so sweeping that it might as well have served as a retraction. * In April he published an attack on Ed Whelan that resulted in another near retraction. * In May he published a story about the Obama torture photos claiming to have come into possession of “sexually explicit” pictures which the Obama administration was refusing to release. It turned out that Salon had published those photos in 2006, negating the entire story and leading to another correction that was tantamount to retraction. For some perspective, during Stephen Glass’s 29-month stint at the New Republic, he was publicly charged with fabrication seven times, and accused of serious journalistic error four times.
