On the subject of my comparison of Andrew Breitbart to Dan Rather, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic writes:

Breitbart makes a malicious error, very similar to a previous malicious error he committed, and lashes out at his critics rather than confess his mistake. CBS makes a sloppy but innocent mistake and fires the responsible parties.

You have to go pretty far down into the dictionary definitions before you get to a place where an “error” can be “malicious.” Errors are mistakes, sincere beliefs in things that turn out to be false, etc.

But in what universe can Breitbart’s subsequently corrected posting of an out-of-context snippet be “malicious” while Dan Rather’s yearslong, consistent, pig-headed, dishonest refusal to admit that his reporting was false and based on fraudulent documents be “innocent”? (Rather’s conduct, not that of the people who eventually fired him, was the subject of my comparison.) If the meanings of those words are that malleable, then those words do not mean anything at all.

Likewise, the Dateline fraud I cited was not “sloppy but innocent” — it’s hard to blow up a truck by accident. In fact, it’s a lot of work committing journalistic fraud. If only there were some obvious example that might leap to mind over at The New Republic ….