Editor & Publisher reports that the Washington Times finally corrected the bogus quote Frank Gaffney attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
More than two days after an inflammatory quote used by a regular Washington Times columnist was shown to be fabricated -- it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln, no less -- the newspaper still had not removed it from the article, nor carried a correction. Finally, on Friday fternoon, it pulled the entire Frank Gaffney, Jr. column.
Then, on Saturday, it ran this correction: "Frank Gaffney's column in the Tuesday Commentary pages of The Washington Times included a quote erroneously attributed to Abraham Lincoln."
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is asserting that Rep. Don Young repeated the phony quote knowing it was false, a charge for which we have no evidence:
It says everything you need to know about the state of the Republican Party: that they would knowingly lie about the words of the greatest Republican president in American history.
Sullivan's claim appears to be based on this post that he linked to from TPM's Greg Sargent, who asked (again without evidence) whether Young knew the quote was bogus:
Given that the discrediting of this quote has been all over the internet for over six months, we have to ask: Did Rep. Young know that the quote was bogus, but recycle it anyway? We'll never know. He certainly seemed to think what he was saying was very profound.
Does anyone think Don Young reads Factcheck.org? I don't know why we would assume he knew the quote was phony. I co-edited Spinsanity for four years and follow politics very closely, and I had never heard of it before.
Finally, it's worth noting the bizarre creation story of the myth. The writer J. Michael Waller sent an email to Factcheck.org that tells you all you need to know about the kind of journalism practiced by the now-defunct Insight magazine:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to correct this important issue. The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.
Additionally, I filed my story with the lead sentence ending in the words "Civil War," which my southern editor switched to "War Between the States."
Oddly, you are the first to question me about this. I'm surprised it has been repeated as often as you say. My editors at the time didn't think it was necessary to run a correction in the following issue of the magazine, and to my knowledge we received no public comment. The magazine is no longer being published.
Factcheck.org continues:
We followed up by contacting Insight's former managing editor Scott Stanley. He denied putting quote marks in Waller's copy, but said such a thing might have been done by one of six "formatting editors" at the publication, who sometimes "took liberties" with the copy. "I know Waller well enough to know that if Waller said it, he did," Stanley said. He said Waller might have put the phrase in italics, and that a formatting editor might have changed it to a direct quote by mistake, following an Insight policy of not opening a story with italicized quotes. "My guess is that somewhere along the line, somebody played with it thinking they were doing the right thing," Stanley said.
Disclosure: I used to blog with Greg Sargent at The American Prospect's Horse's Mouth blog before resigning in protest.
Correction 2/17 9:19 PM: Greg Sargent did not directly "speculate" that Don Young knew the Lincoln quote was bogus, as this post previously stated. Apologies for the error, which is corrected above.