As we all should know by now, the initial reports that we get on any story will almost always turn out to be false, especially if reported by television news. The problem is that those first "reports" tend to have a life and tenacity of their own, and many people--especially those who rely entirely on TV news and partisan blogs for their "information"--continue to believe the misinformation long after it's has been debunked.
To wit:
- In the first Iraq war, "on-the-scene" television reporting from CNN and others suggested that "smart bombs" and Patriot missiles were almost 100% effective. The real story that was pieced together later proved that this was fiction.
- Initial reporting on the Fast and Furious operation proved to be false, but we had to wait weeks before an unbiased analysis by a Fortune magazine reporter gave us the real story. Indeed, it seems that the "whistleblower" relied on by Darrell Issa and the Obama haters may have been the only bad guy in the whole affair.
- More recently, an ABC reporter claimed to have smoking-gun emails about the Benghazi incident. It took a former Fox News reporter to give us the real story a little later: the emails were fabricated.
The point is that a lot of people still believe the original story, even after the real story is finally available. Now we have the IRS "scandal". It turns out (as many of us expected) that many of these groups deserved the scrutiny they were getting and some even lied on their applications. You won't hear this real story from the likes of Charles Krauthammer or Peggy Noonan. In fact, they will probably keep repeating the untruth. (Both of them have become caricatures of themselves, but I digress.) They are too occupied with their state of perpetual frenzied outrage.
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