Politico uncritically cited anonymous White House aides touting Bush "vindication" on stem cells, air traffic improvements

SUMMARY: The Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote that unnamed "Bush advisers are considering ways to call attention to scientists' announcement, which the White House believes was lost in Thanksgiving week, about discoveries that could lead to the creation of stem cells without embryos -- a vindication, in the view of Bush's aides, of his reservations about approving broader federal funding of embryonic stem cell research." But Allen and VandeHei did not note that the senior author of the paper that announced that discovery, James Thomson, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that the research "[f]ar from vindicat[es] the current U.S. policy of withholding federal funds."

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