NBC Retracts Story About Biden Official — But Then Doesn’t Remove it
William B. Plowman/NBC
NBC News retracted a story about a member of the Biden administration contributing to a pro-Israel political action committee — but curiously left the full story up on its website.
NBC said that “in the interest of transparency,” it was leaving the story posted in its “archives” and provided a link to the full story.
“Earlier today, NBC News published an article reporting that a family foundation linked to President Joe Biden’s senior director for cyber policy on the White House National Security Council donated more than $500,000 in recent years to AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington,” the company noted in a message published on its website. “After a number of readers raised issues with this article, NBC News conducted a review and has determined that it fell short of our reporting standards.”
“In order to warrant publication, it needed on-the-record quotes from critics, rather than anonymous ones,” the company added. “The article should have also included more views from those who believe that donations to AIPAC do not represent a conflict. And it did not give Neuberger adequate time to respond to our reporting.”
The note came after the story, published by NBC national security correspondent Ken Dilanian, drew scrutiny from critics including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Charges of dual loyalty are anti-Semitic and insult millions of Americans — Jewish & non-Jewish — who stand by our ally Israel,” the group wrote Thursday on Twitter as part of its call for the retraction. “We will not be deterred from exercising our rights as citizens to advocate for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.”
Jeff McCall, a journalism professor at DePauw University, pointed out that the company didn’t actually “retract” the story since it remains up.
“The NBC explanation isn’t technically a retraction, but it does demonstrate that the original story caused NBC to do some reflection,” McCall said in a comment to Mediaite. “Of particular note is that NBC seems to be criticizing its own use of anonymous sources, a practice NBC has apparently had no trouble doing in recent years.”
“It seems to me that the NBC explanation doesn’t go far enough in providing context to what prompted the NBC hierarchy to backtrack on the original story,” McCall added. “Pressure was surely applied from somewhere, and full transparency should dictate that news consumers know from where that heat originated.”
So the story was retracted because it did not meet NBC News standards for publication — yet remains published on the NBC News website, where you can read the story that apparently does not qualify to be published on said website. Got it.
