"New example" of Blumenthal quote "unearthed" by Politico is anything but

[deminks]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201005210002

Politico is reporting tonight that the Danbury News-Times has "unearthed two new examples of Democratic Attorney General Richard Blumenthal suggesting that he served in Vietnam." One of those examples, however, seems to have appeared in the original New York Times article on Blumenthal's service.

(snip)

It is the Post's quote that the News-Times and Politico are both citing today as "new." But it seems clear -- unless there were two events at the same building during the same year in which Blumenthal offered nearly identical comments -- that the Post's quote and the New York Times' quote are from the same speech. Indeed, searches of the Nexis and Factiva databases uncover no contemporaneous reports besides the Post's of a Blumenthal speech in 2008 at Shelton's Veterans War Memorial Building.

Also -- and here we see the problem with relying on print reports to draw conclusions about a speaker's specific word choices -- it appears that one of the accounts misquotes Blumenthal, as the Times' and Post's quotes are slightly different.

Adding to the confusion is that the News-Times has incorrectly placed that speech as occurring in May 2009, rather than in May 2008, an error that Politico copied.

(end snip)