Why the media is in trouble.

Patrick Frey catches NPR's ombusman making up "spin" - claiming that Ron Schiller - last seen calling the Tea Party a bunch of scary racists - as saying on the same video where he was outed that he is a Republican.  The problem is that he didn't say it and the video never says it.

Make that two problems.

When called on it, NPR ombudsman, Alicia Shepard. spins like a PR flack, not like someone whose job it is to make sure that mistakes are corrected.  Frey observes:

Note a few things about this statement. First, unlike the original, incendiary claim, which was repeated by more than 100 people, including Jack Shafer (who has now issued a correction) and Radley Balko, this tweet was repeated by only 8 people. And it’s termed a “clarification” — which is just amazing, given that her original claim was flatly wrong. She needs a “correction” and not a “clarification.” She needs to admit she was wrong. Isn’t it the job of an “ombudsman” to be clear about admitting error? Isn’t it the job of an “ombudsman” to care about facts in the first place, and not make statements with no basis in facts? I summed it up in my last e-mail to Shepard:


In other words, you never had a basis for saying what you said, and you are not clearly admitting error.

This is NPR’s regard for facts??

Apparently so.

Well, maybe she thinks that people who are not among the "predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite" core that makes up NPR's listeners are too stupid to notice that she can't be trusted.