Steve Gilliard has
posted his response to the ongoing libel of Kos by
The New Republic's Jason Zengerle.
By way of background, Zengerle over the past few days has posted numerous attacks on Markos implying that Markos lords over all bloggers, providing them with marching orders about what to write and when to write it. One of Zengerle's examples was an email Markos sent to a private list called Townhouse. Zengerle also posted what he alleged was a response to Markos written by Steve Gilliard. The problem is that it appears Gilliard never wrote such an email.
Glenn Greenwald, who is a member of the list, penned a scorching response to Zengerle, calling him a new
Stephen Glass:
That e-mail is completely fictitious. Gilliard never sent any such thing to the Townhouse list, nor did anyone else do so. Nor, according to Gilliard, did he ever write any such e-mail at all, to Townhouse or anyone else. Zengerle caused The New Republic to print a completely fabricated e-mail and then falsely attribute it as one Gilliard sent to the Townhouse list. How and why did that happen?
Gilliard doesn't go as far as Glenn Greenwald, but he confirms that he has no record of sending any such email to the Townhouse list:
To be fair, I told Glenn I disagreed with the characterization of it being false, because I may have express some kind of sentiment close to that. The issue to me is not that Zengerle created it out of whole cloth, but if he got it from a source that he was too lazy and sloppy to confirm it with me. Let me be clear, I didn't deny writing the e-mail. I said that I had no record of writing such an e-mail with that phrase, to the list on that day.
I told Zengerle the same thing and that he needs to provide the provenance of the e-mail so I can confirm or deny it. If it turns out I didn't write those words, I'm going to write Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic and demand a retraction and an apology.
I write thousands of words a day betweeen e-mails, IM, posts and comments. It is easy to lose a phrase or e-mail in that, which I why I can't call it a fabrication. It may be taken from another e-mail, or a post, but I cannot find those words in my mailbox
The bottom line is that that regardless of whether Gilliard sent the email, Zengerle should have called for confirmation before publishing his hit piece:
Zengerle sent me [Gilliard] a list of questions, which I will answer publicly when this is resolved. After all, with a massive breach of journalism ethics in the air, I need a resoultion before answering any of his questions.
But even if Greenwald goes farther than I would, the question remains why didn't Zengerle do any interviews for his pieces. Why didn't he extend the basic journalism courtesy of asking if these were my words and if they were send to the Townhouse list? I mean that's basic shit, Reporting I stuff.
The whole TNR jihad has bordered on reckless. Accusations based on e-mails and assumptions, not even the courtesy of an interview or even an e-mail, all to prove that the left blogs are Kos's slaves.
. . .
Now, some people may wonder why I didn't hammer Zengerle up and down the blog and call him a bald faced liar.
Let me explain something: presenting something false as something real and attributed to a person is a firing offense. This is not a game, If he was misled by a source, he deserves the chance to prove it. If he just pulled it out of his ass, I expect Frank Foer to fire him
because this would be the third major breach of ethics for TNR. Before I lead a charge to ruin a life, I need evidence I was done a wrong, and I can't say that exists yet. It may not. It may.
And the blogwars continue . . .