Joe Carter takes time out from rightfully celebrating the Huckster’s victory to offer a sincere apology:
Earlier this week I made reference to a rumor going around about Mitt Romney. Several readers–including a few men who I respect greatly–gently chastised me for making the remark. As my friend Steve Camp wrote in a comment, “You dishonor the FRC and the body of Christ by joining in on this type of negative pandering….
But they are right; I am guilty of behaving shamefully. I owe an apology not only to Mitt Romney but to all of the readers of this blog. I am truly sorry that I stopped so low as to spread such gossip.
I don’t accept Joe’s apology because I don’t believe it is necessary. In fact, I wish Joe hadn’t merely mentioned the rumor that apparently everyone inside the campaigns knows, but informed the uninformed masses precisely what the insiders were discussing. One of the primary benefits of the blogosphere is that it makes information previously available only to the elite available to everyone and it does not behoove bloggers to mimic the outmoded media’s standard designed to protect the political elite from scrutiny by the people.
The truth is that the media always gets it wrong. Always. I was recently interviewed by a newspaper reporter and was blatantly misquoted – not actually misquoted, the reporter erroneously wrote that I said something in keeping with the story narrative that I did not actually say. I wasn’t upset because this sort of thing has happened literally every time but one that I have been a part of a newspaper story or television report.
I’m quite aware that rumors get out of hand and some of them are completely false. There’s no shortage of wildly inaccurate ones about me out there, but that’s true of every public figure with critics, no matter how insignificant they might be. I don’t think the Biblical injunction applies in this situation because information that could reflect on the selection of a national leader isn’t mere gossip and if the information is available to the power players, it should also be available to the voting public.