Working hard for the money

UPDATE Note: Edits (in red and strike-through) were made to more accurately reflect Tapper's revised blog post. These edits were made after someone identifying himself as Jake Tapper (I have no way of verifying) left some comments below.

Remember last December when the well-paid Joe Klein huffily declared:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right.

That came after Klein repeatedly botched both his facts and analysis of a pending FISA bill in a Time magazine article and on Time’s Swampland blog.

It was embarrassingly clear that Klein had never even read the bill, and some cyber-punk named Glenn Greenwald righteously and rightfully blasted lazy Joe with pixels ablazing.

Now ABC News' Senior National Correspondent
Jake Tapper admits that he was too busy eating a chicken sandwich to obtain the definitive and readily available primary source for to bother to check up on a Drudge Report story before posting about it on his ABC News blog.

The Drudge story alleged that Mickey Kantor, an informal advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign, had once insulted the good people of Indiana and that the insult was documented in the film, The War Room. The clip -- to which Tapper helpfully linked -- was even available on YouTube.

It’s unclear whether Tapper ever doubted Drudge’s story or the audio clarity of the YouTube clip. and/or whether it ever occurred to him that the YouTube clip had been doctored. What’s perfectly clear is that Tapper is a very busy man.

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.

Tapper overlooks another option. If he was too busy to review the pertinent segment of The War Room, to investigate the legitimacy of the Drudge story, he could have simply not posted about it. Then he wouldn’t have to temporarily yank questionable doctored YouTube clips off his blog and post weaselly explanations like this:

As it is, all I can do is post this to explain why I took down the original blog entry, and re-post it with all the added context above.

The “added context” being the chicken sandwich.