Crush Liberalism

“Ex-ABC consultant said to fake interview”

Maybe the interview was, in the words of the disgraced Dan Rather, “fake but accurate”? From the AP:

A former ABC News consultant fired last year because he couldn’t authenticate academic credentials is at the center of a new dispute over apparently faked interviews with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and others.

The consultant, Alexis Debat, quit the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, on Wednesday after Obama’s representatives claimed an interview with the senator appearing under Debat’s byline in the French magazine Politique Internationale never took place. The interview quoted the Democratic presidential candidate as saying the Iraq war was “a defeat for America.”

Pelosi, Gates, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all said they never gave interviews that appeared in the magazine under Debat’s byline, ABC News’ Web site, the Blotter, reported on Thursday.
…
In the other cases, Debat said he drafted questions for the political figures for Politique Internationale. The magazine sent back “answers” that he translated, wrote an introduction for and sent back with his byline, he said.

“They do some weird things over there,” he said.

Politique Internationale editor and political scientist Patrick Wajsman founded the magazine nearly 30 years ago. He called Debat “a grand liar” and said he had hired a lawyer to pursue “all possible measures” against him.
…
The Blotter quoted a U.N. official as saying Wajsman was told in 2005 that the interview with Annan was faked. A second “interview” with Annan posted earlier this year instead included portions of a speech he had made at Princeton University passed off as an interview, the Web site said.

Debat had been a consultant at ABC News since shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, reporting on terrorism issues, said Brian Ross, chief of ABC News’ investigative unit.
…
Since the revelations about the fabricated interviews, ABC News also is going back again to check over Debat’s work, sending people to Pakistan and Europe, Ross said.

“We’re working hard to make sure that everything he was involved in that we reported stands up,” Ross said, “and if it doesn’t, we’ll report it immediately.”

Thank goodness the MSM has “multiple layers of fact-checking“, otherwise some lying schmuck would be able to worm his way into working for an outlet like ABC for six years. Oh, wait…

September 14, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | media bias