The Daily Caller Quadruples-Down on Its Wrongness

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/atoxinsocks/4254919655/">daveoratox</a>/Flickr

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Earlier this week, I published a post pointing out that the Daily Caller‘s claim that the EPA plans to hire 230,000 employees to enforce new climate regulations is false. Since then the Daily Caller has quadrupled-down on the claim, despite a number of other outlets—first Politico, then Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog—also pointing out that it was flat-out wrong. Now the Caller has published an editor’s note that, rather than reasserting the claim, attempts to reframe their entire argument.

In the note, David Martosko, the Daily Caller‘s executive editor, claims that the EPA “might hire as many as 230,000.” This is a different argument than the Caller was making earlier this week, which was that the EPA actually planned to do this. (It’s also different from the argument the Caller made to Politico, which is that its claim was true simply because massive bureaucratic overreach is what EPA is wont to do.) But the argument still misclassifies the entire context of the figure, which is that it came from a legal brief in which EPA was defending an attempt to avoid taking that action.

Despite what Martosko claims, Greg Sargent didn’t vindicate the Daily Caller‘s story—he merely offered the publication another opportunity to once again defend its (false) claim. The Washington Examiner story, which Martosko also suggests vindicates the original piece, actually points out that the Caller was wrong in its claim that the EPA is asking taxpayers to shoulder the cost of the regulations, and reiterates the fact that this is exactly what the agency is trying to avoid.

As a side note, dismissing Mother Jones as a “fringe” publication doesn’t make the Daily Caller‘s original story any less false. See David Corn’s piece for more on that front.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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