I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that  they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s  nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested  documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a  group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.”

There was, it turns out, a problem with the story: Friends of Hamas does not  exist, and never has. Slate’s Dave Weigel did  the work to prove this last week, and on Wednesday, the New York Daily  News’ Dan Friedman followed  up, disclosing that he was, by way of a jokey hypothetical apparently  filtered through Capitol Hill’s version of the telephone game, the source for  the idea that Friends of Hamas existed and that it might in some way be  connected to Chuck Hagel.

It may have taken a couple weeks and the work of a couple good reporters for  Friends of Hamas’s non-existence and Shapiro’s grievous mistake to be  definitively proven, but the flaw in Shapiro’s post was evident as soon as it  was published, and should have been clear to him even before that. The day that  Shapiro’s story first came out, I searched  both Google and Lexis-Nexis to find information about Friends of Hamas; the only  records of its existence I was able to find were Shapiro’s post and links to it.  That wasn’t definitive proof that the group didn’t exist, but it was a strong  indicator, and anyone else who took the five or ten minutes necessary to conduct  those searches would have seen the same thing. Yet Shapiro and Breitbart.com  went ahead with the report anyway, and a significant number of outlets on the  right, from radio shows and blogs to the National Review, picked up the  news and ran with it based on nothing more.

Now, Shapiro and Breitbart.com are refusingto  admit that Shapiro made a serious mistake, and attackinganyone who suggestsotherwise.  This kind of behavior from them is unsurprising, and not just because it’s an  outgrowth of the worldview and strategy of their founder, Andrew Breitbart. (For  more on Breitbart, who died last year, see Rebecca  Mead’s Profile of him from 2010.) To be embarrassed about the story, they’d  have to understand that the hypothesis of Shapiro’s story was “Chuck Hagel may  have been the recipient of funding from a group called Friends of Hamas,” and  they’d have to care about proving it true. Their version of the hypothesis is  much simpler, and more vicious: “Someone told us that Chuck Hagel may have been  the recipient of funding from a group called Friends of Hamas.” This has the  virtue, from a certain perspective, of being completely unfalsifiable—as soon as  the source gave them the tip, the story was true by definition and in  perpetuity, no matter what.

There is no reporter who is incapable of error, no established media outlet  without a black mark or twenty on its record. But those are generally mistakes  or aberrations; this is the Breitbart.com way of doing business. Where  journalists are researchers, they see themselves as warriors, picking up  Breitbart’s hashtagged  mantle #WAR. With that mindset, the kind of rigor they demand from the  mainstream media becomes a hindrance.

It’s not often that one sees the kind of blatant disregard for the truth  involved in the Friends of Hamas story. Still, even as the right has made more  of an effort to establish its own journalistic endeavors, conservative media  outlets, in practice, are still failing all too often to properly vet their  stories. Never has this been more evident than during the Hagel confirmation  fight. Obviously, there’s something to be said for tenaciousness, especially  when it comes to checking into someone who is slated to become one of the most  important people in the American government. But there’s a difference between  dogged reporting and reporting that pretends even the most meager evidence—loose  paraphrases, faded memories, suggestions—is definitive proof. Nor has this been  limited to Hagel.

Late last year, the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper (who has  been one of Hagel’s most insistentpursuers  lately) wrote a blog post about questions that NBC anchor David Gregory had  posed to the N.R.A.’s Wayne LaPierre’s about the latter’s proposal to put armed  guards in schools. Halper reported:

But when it comes to Gregory’s own kids, however, they are secured  every school day by armed guards.

The Gregory children go to school with the children of President Barack  Obama, according to the Washington  Post. That school is the co-ed Quaker school Sidwell Friends.

According to a scan of the school’s online faculty-staff directory, Sidwell  has a security department made up of at least 11 people. Many of those are  police officers, who are presumably armed.

Moreover, with the Obama kids in attendance, there is a secret service  presence at the institution, as well.

(This report later worked its way into an N.R.A.  ad about President Obama’s children.)

It’s true, of course, that there is a Secret Service detail protecting the  Obama children, even when they’re at school. But the bits about Gregory’s kids  being “secured every school day by armed guards,” and about Sidwell’s security  department and members of it being armed? Well, that’s just not true, as the Post’s Glenn Kessler documented.  Moreover, Halper had every reason to be wary, and to do some careful reporting  before publishing his story—Sidwell is, as he noted, a Quaker school, and  Quakers are well known for pacifism. (Richard Nixon excepted.) Again, as in  Shapiro’s case, that fact alone isn’t proof that Sidwell security wouldn’t carry  guns, but it should have been obvious to Halper that it was at least a  potentially serious flaw in his hypothesis. He went ahead with his story anyway;  as of now, it remains, despite Kessler’s report, without any sort of update or  correction. (Halper didn’t respond to an e-mail requesting comment.)

At some point, if they want to be taken more seriously, members of the  conservative media will have to take their own  declarations about the commitment  to journalism more seriously. More importantly, they’ll have to realize that  reporting isn’t just the means to a desired political end; done right, it’s the  end in itself, no matter what it digs up.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.