Alicia Shepard, the NPR ombudsman, tweets:
Ron Schiller said in the full two hour Okeefe video he is a Republican, and was raised as a Republican. that didn’t make it in video
Oh, come on! That doesn’t even pass the laugh test. This guy, who hates Republicans so much, is actually one himself? Please.
Patterico actually went to the trouble to prove it untrue and request a correction. His exchange is unreal. First he finds out what Schiller actually said:
I grew up a Republican and am proud of that even though I’ve voted mostly Democratic lately.
So, not a Republican. Then he sends the index into the video to Shepard. (ASIDE: The part about “that didn’t make it in video” was also untrue. Unlike the legacy media, O’Keefe always releases the full video.)
It turns out that Shepard never watched the video, she was working from a transcript that someone prepared. (Even when Patterico sent the index, she still didn’t want to watch the video.) But even the transcript didn’t support her statement. She was just guessing what Schiller said where the transcript read “unintelligible” and guessed wrong. In fact, if she had watched the video she would have found that part wasn’t the least bit unintelligible.
In the end, Patterico finally gets through, and Shepard posts a correction. But despite the fact that her original tweet was flat wrong, she calls her correction a clarification.
Keep in mind that this is the ombudsman. It’s not the first time she’s done such shoddy, dishonest work either. Sounds like NPR needs a meta-ombudsman.
Internet Scofflaw 