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Jay Rosen at PressThink has been catching up on Jonathan Karl's Exclusive from May 10th on the CIA's preparation of talking points on the arson-assassination at the Benghazi Consulate last September. This is how I covered that story at the time (here, here and here) and this is Rosen's post about Karl's problems with relying on inaccurate sources.
Having contacted both Rosen and Karl about this controversy, this is my conclusion (cross-posted at PressThink):
The essence of Jonathan Karl's scoop in the Benghazi Consulate story on ABC on May 10th, was his exclusive revelation that the talking points prepared for members of the Intelligence Committee by the CIA (the ones that also guided Ambassador Susan Rice on those Sunday morning shows) had gone through a series of 12 drafts, each one more vague and less informative, with the end result that their imprecision turned out to be deceptive. Specifically, the decisions not to redact the point about the anti-blasphemy protests, but to redact the point about the al-Qaeda-connected Ansar al-Sharia militia, amounted to misleading the public.
It is that process of deception-by-redaction that Karl has defended as the central point of his exclusive, and has led him to stand by it. Karl never actually uses the term "deceit" but his implication is clear.
There are two subsidiary elements to the story, which Karl either stated or implied, that do not contradict his deception-by-redaction thesis, yet do cast it in a different light. First, who made the changes? Second, what was the motive for the changes?
1.Who made the changes? Karl's exclusive on May 10th asserted that either the White House or the State Department made at least some of the changes. The story leads with Jay Carney's claim that those two institutions only changed one word, a claim that Karl contradicts. He later, on May 15th, reported that the final changes were made by the CIA. He remains silent about which of the intermediary changes were made by the White House or by State instead, yet he stands by his premise that some of them were.
2.What was the motive for the changes? In his exclusive report, Karl focuses on the State Department, with its concerns not to open itself to criticism from members of Congress, as the motivator for the redactions. Subsequently a memo has surfaced, written by Ben Rhodes at the White House, that casts doubt on the State Department's influence over the CIA. First, Rhodes never singles out State's concerns; second, he does single out the FBI's concerns that its investigation should not be compromised, as is standard procedure.
The fact that Karl's reporting relied on an incorrect paraphrase of Rhodes' memo, which inaccurately did spell out State's particular concerns, makes Karl's decision to point to State as the motivator less convincing. In Karl's defense, he did not report on World News, either on the 10th or the 15th, that the changes were made to the talking points because of State's input; only that they were made after State's input. This distinction between "after" and "because of" is never spelled out for viewers.
On the other hand, as said, he did report that some of the intermediary changes were in fact made by either State or the White House, and earlier on the 10th, on Good Morning America, he quoted from an e-mail (again, one he had not seen but had been read to him) that the CIA changed some words after being "directed" to do so by State (later that day on World News, Karl made no stronger claim than "input" from State).
So, Karl's scoop about the fact of the changes in the talking points was a genuine one. His reporting on who made the changes and why they were made is vague or shifting or absent.
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