About that tweet! The final chapter
Have you ever lost your wallet and started looking in the last pair of pants you had on, then searched the floor near your pants, then your jacket, your coat, the place where you leave your keys, your car ... and you can't find the wallet anywhere? And then when you get up the next morning, you remember you went to the store after you got home from work ... and put on some different pants?
That's kinda what just happened to me. It all started after Keith Olbermann was kind enough to retweet me on his "Countdown" show last week. Fox News got on my case to produce the email that was the basis of my tweet. Unfortunately, I'd deleted my source. I knew I'd seen what I'd seen, and that my 113-character joke tweet was accurate. (I love writing that phrase: 113-character joke tweet.)
So I began a three-day search for the deleted email, working with the IT department ... and meanwhile, Fox News contacted Danny Shea at the Huffington Post. Shea didn't even contact me for background. He just ran with it, and even asserted in his headline (reproduced above) that Fox News was right and I was wrong.
I stood my ground, the bloggers took it from there, and voila! -- instant, needless controversy.
By Wednesday, it started to look like we weren't going to find that email, which I had read at work on my kcstar.com account. And with people starting to call into the Star, I decided to tell my readers what had happened.
Then this morning, it suddenly occurred to me: What if Fox News sent the same email to my tvbarn address? And there it was, buried in my daily mountain of 200 news alerts and PR. Gmail puts them in a separate folder that I'd never thought to check.
So, to review, here is the little tweet that started the big kerfuffle:
Fox News PR just emailed to let me know Glenn Beck will be raising fears tonight on his TV show. No poop, Poirot.
And here is the source text, page one:
To be fair and balanced, Fox News told us late on Friday that the above email didn't come from PR but from another department in Fox. Also, I didn’t quite recall the subject line from memory when the email was still missing, but now that it’s found, there’s no disputing that the tweet was a spot-on paraphrase.
P.S. If you're wondering whether Glenn really did kick it up a notch for his very special H1N1 vaccine show, enjoy this clip from "The Daily Show":
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Doubt Break '09 | ||||
| ||||
