Yesterday, a YouTube video spread throughout the blogosphere and media like mildew in a lazy bachelor’s shower stall.  The clip’s audio is terribly unclear, but the editor inserted subtitles to give the false impression that Mickey Kantor, a former Bill Clinton campaign staffer and Clinton Administration official, had said unkind things about the people of Indiana back in 1992 (while Kantor was being filmed for the documentary The War Room).

What interesting timing: Hillary Clinton happens to be facing Indiana’s primary election in four days, and Kantor is connected to her campaign.

Figuring the video was a hoax, I decided to wait to blog about it until after the hoax was exposed, which took only a few hours. 

According to the Washington Post, the man who alerted political reporters about the video is Eric Schmeltzer, a political and public relations consultant "who favors Barack Obama."  The person who doctored and uploaded the video to YouTube is still unknown.

Apparently, Mr. Schmeltzer didn’t bother verifying the video clip before sounding the trumpets — and neither did some of the media outlets and bloggers who helped spread the story. Perhaps they were too gleefully focused on the opportunity to propagate "negative" about Hillary, what with the Indiana primary so close. 

Given her recent gains in some polls, what better time to sling poop at Hillary?

Running an unverified story simply to provoke readers’ emotions is the sort of thing that Matt Drudge would do.  Scratch that: it’s exactly what Matt Drudge did do with this story. 

Just hours after the story erupted, Media Matters showed just how easy the verification process was by getting and watching a digital copy of The War Room.  Media Matters uploaded a clearer version of the relevant video clip here and explained how ABC’s Jake Tapper had shirked his journalistic duties when handling the story:

"In a May 2 post on his ABC News blog Political Punch, ABC News senior national correspondent Jake Tapper republished a May 1 post he had temporarily taken down, in which he asserted:

"Bill Clinton’s Trade Representative, a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and an informal adviser to her campaign — once seemed to have some not-so-nice things to say about the Hoosiers his chosen candidate is working so hard to pursue. As seen in The War Room, watching election returns come in, [Mickey] Kantor seems to say in hushed tones to James Carville, ‘Look at Indiana, wait, wait — look at Indiana. 42-40. It doesn’t matter if we win. Those people are s—. Excuse me.’ "

"After noting that both Kantor and War Room director D.A. Pennebaker have reportedly denied that Kantor called people from Indiana "shit," Tapper added:

‘Were I not currently eating a chicken sandwich at Liberty East Restaurant in Charlotte, NC, while working on a World News piece about the economy and the candidates, I would go to Blockbuster, rent a copy of The War Room and settle this matter as much as possible.’

"Media Matters for America did obtain a digital copy of The War Room and downloaded the relevant section… [It] clearly indicates that Kantor is not saying, "Those people are shit"; he is, in fact, saying, "Those people are shitting," presumably referring to the Bush campaign’s reaction to the poll numbers he was reading. (Media Matters, emphasis added)

The title of Media Matters’ piece makes my point for me: If Tapper had put down his chicken sandwich and rented The War Room, he’d know that Mickey Kantor did not call Indiana voters "Shit."

MSNBC also ran the story on a network blog, apparently without verifying the YouTube video first — as did some major (pro-Obama) blogs including Daily Kos and America Blog.

Ultimately, those networks and blogs ran corrective updates, but how many thousands of people  didn’t read the corrections after reading the initial (false) stories? How many are Indiana voters?

Incidentally, the story got local play in Indiana yesterday at WSBT TV and WSBT Radio in South Bend.

Does anyone still wonder whether some media outlets and blogs carry heavy pro-Obama or anti-Hillary biases?

Memeorandum has links to blogs that ran related stories.

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Originally published at Buck Naked Politics.