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Truthiness In Action
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In the annals of dirty politics, an attempt by a Deadspin reporter to take down Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner ranks pretty high, except for the outcome: Focusing on a passage in a Washington Post profile, reporter Dave McKenna made some desultory stabs at research and decided to run a post alleging that Gardner lied about playing high school football. Only one problem with that: Gardner did play high school football. McKenna's source says he told McKenna that after initially forgetting. There are pictures that the reporter could have found in a quick check of high school yearbooks. Yet McKenna, who has done much good work, especially with the Daniel Snyder/Redskins story, flat out called Gardner a liar, and, after social media blew up the story (and Gardner tweeted his football pictures), Deadspin's "update" left the liar headline and lede in there and seemed less an apology/retraction than an attempt to say playing through 10th grade isn't really playing high school football (but it is, and it doesn't contradict what Gardner said in the Post). It's an example of how Internet "gotcha" journalism works, how it can implode, and how advocacy journalism sometimes ignores the truth even when that truth becomes known. (Denver Post)
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