This is the latest post in what I call jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga®. If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog. So if you are new to the story, go to this page and you’ll be able to catch up on what has been happening.
So today is correction day at Allergic to Bull. On one hand, I made an embarrassing mistake and a big correction in a post earlier today. It puts egg on your face, but it happens.
And now I am going to talk about the correction that didn’t happen in Alex Pareene’s piece last week. He wrote a piece for Salon entitled Brett Kimberlin versus right wing bloggers, which seemed at first glance to be pretty risible. For instance, here’s what I consider to be the most questionable part in the piece, discussing how Stacy McCain and his family fled their home after Kimberlin contacted his wife’s work:
Kimberlin does, in a way, accept responsibility for McCain’s flight, but he says Robert Stacy McCain is blogging from an “undisclosed location” not because he fears for his family’s safety, but because he was living on a compound owned by his church, which was alarmed to learn of his extremist beliefs and writings. Here’s the story from the site “Breitbart Unmasked,” which is written by an unknown blogger, but which essentially supports Kimberlin’s version of events:
According to my sources the church leaders claimed to Mr. Kimberlin after reading several Google entries about McCain’s racism and hatred, that this is NOT what the church was about in its teachings.
It goes on, but you get the idea. By the way it was written, it appears that Pareene is backing up Kimberlin’s version of events by citing an anonymously written blogger who cites anonymous sources without any apparent effort to actually verify the claim. Even if you don’t know that there is widespread suspicion that Breitbart Unmasked is Brett Kimberlin, that is such extremely flimsy sourcing that in my opinion it shouldn’t have been aired.
So I called out Pareene a little bit on twitter and then I wrote him a long email criticizing his article and seeking corrections. And we went back and forth and he eventually issued a correction and an update, but only a partial one. And that left me in a conundrum. For instance, publicly he wrote this:
Your tribal political sympathies — or your opinion of the people involved on each side – may determine on which side you fall, though no one involved seems capable of telling the whole truth.
And since I was one of the people “involved,” it was reasonable to surmise that he felt that I was one of the people who was not capable of telling the whole truth.
And yet when I emailed and complained about that, he wrote back to me:
I think you’re an honest person, really.
Well, he should have altered or otherwise fixed what he wrote, right? But he didn’t. And he wrote other things in that email that made it clear that he recognized that much of what he wrote shouldn’t have been written, or should have been corrected... but weren’t.
