Confirmed: Breitbart Sites Won't Correct Obvious Factual Errors

For somebody who runs around the media landscape demanding the press fix its mistakes, Andrew Breitbart turns an amazingly blind eye when his own sites are caught fabricating information. And Breitbart remains quite disciplined in terms of ignoring repeated requests that his sites fix blatant factual errors.

Recently, Mother Jones, MediaBugs, and a New York Times reporter all highlight the hypocrisy that fuels Breitbart and his sites.

Specifically, on Sept. 6, Breitbart's Big Government published a piece that made this claim [emphasis added]:

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world's most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report's authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

Slight problem. Profession Jyrki Kauppinen was not one of the report's authors.

Not very complicated, right? Breitbart's blogger made a glaring error in the first paragraph of his piece and that error ought to be acknowledged and corrected. Ah, but this is Andrew Breitbart we're talking about.

New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin noticed the “cosmic” blunder and submitted it to MediaBugs, a site that tries to keep the press honest. MediaBugs contacted Big Government and informed editors about the error. Then via Twitter, MediaBugs requested several times that Breitbart address the misinformation. But as Mother Jones notes, he won't respond and nobody at Big Government will concede the error was made, or make any effort to correct it.

None of this is all that surprising, given Breitbart's record of dishonesty. But it's helpful to keep the stonewalling in mind next time he starts parading around, demand corrections.