Think Progress reports on a Nov. 2 NewsBusters post by P.J. Gladnick claiming that an audio interview Barack Obama did with the San Francisco Chronicle — suddently controversial because right-wingers are using it to claim that Obama wants to “bankrupt the coal industry” — “has been hidden from the public…until now.” In fact, as the Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci points out, the entire audio file has been available on the Chronicle’s website since January.
In apparent response, Gladnick updated the post to claim that the Chronicle “did not include any mention of Obama’s willingness to bankrupt the coal industry which you can hear on the audio.” Warner Todd Huston similarly chimes in: “[T]hese are really not ‘months-old comments’ in the strictest sense that we were all made familiar with Obama’s anti-coal comments back in January. Since January, the San Francisco Chronicle has steadfastly left these incendiary comments entirely out of its coverage.”
Marinucci also calls out NewsBusters for previous offenses: “the shoddy Newsbusters blog has been caught in the past simply fabricating news regarding the Chronicle’s coverage. Our paper has demanded corrections for their fiction, but to no avail.” Indeed, we have also caught NewsBusters making numerous false and misleading claims that it has shown little interest in correcting.