Politico.com's massive and multiple ethical fail.

Yesterday, I had to modify a post on this blog shortly after publishing it. I had quoted material from a Politico.com story, and it turned out that Politico had made a very large error. Georgia Rep. Phil Gingery had given them a quote that was highly critical of Rush Limbaugh, and they somehow or another managed to attribute that quote to Rep. Tom Price instead.

Not only did they get the quote wrong in the article, they also apparently told Rush that Tom Price was talking about him. Here's a paragraph from the original version of the Politico article in question:

Asked to respond to Price, Limbaugh, in an email to Politico, wrote: "I don't know Tom Price. I'm sure he is doing his best but it does not appear to be good enough. He may not have noticed that the number of Republican colleagues he has in the House has dwindled. And they will dwindle more if he and his friends don't show more leadership and effectiveness in battling the most left-wing agenda in modern history. And they won't continue to lose because of me, but because of their relationship with the grassroots, which is hurting. Conservatives want leadership from those who claim to represent them. And we'll know it when we see it."

I'd love to give you a link to that particular quote on the Politico site, but I can't, because they seem to have dropped it down the memory hole. So you'll have to settle for this link to the original article, instead. When Politico first updated their article after being informed of their error, they changed the paragraph above to the version that you see on their page right now:

Asked to respond to Gingrey, Limbaugh, in an email to Politico, wrote: "I'm sure he is doing his best but it does not appear to be good enough. He may not have noticed that the number of Republican colleagues he has in the House has dwindled. And they will dwindle more if he and his friends don't show more leadership and effectiveness in battling the most left-wing agenda in modern history. And they won't continue to lose because of me, but because of their relationship with the grassroots, which is hurting. Conservatives want leadership from those who claim to represent them. And we'll know it when we see it."

Notice the two changes. They changed "asked to respond to Price" to "asked to respond to Gingrey", and they excised the part of the Limbaugh quote ("I don't know Tom Price") that makes it clear that they had, in fact, informed Rush that the culprit was Price.

This morning, in my RSS feed, I found another version of the Politico article. This particular version has a new title (Limbaugh takes a hit from Gingrey). That makes three different headlines that have been used for this particular piece. In addition to the change at the top, they also made another change at the bottom - one that shows a distinct lack of commitment to basic ethics.

When they changed the original article, they appended the following note to the bottom of the story:

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the GOP member as Rep. Tom Price. Politico regrets the error.

This morning's version omits even that somewhat incomplete mea culpa. In the rapidly changing world we believe in, it's nice to know that someone still believes that mistakes can be erased that easily.