As my Executive Assistant often points out to me, when a story lands on your desk that appears too good to be true, it usually is. Case in point, E! Online’s article of March 3rd, “Sarah Palin and Grabby Entourage ‘Like Locusts’ at Oscar Gift Suite” by Ted Casablanca and Whitney English.  The background of the article is that Palin attended a pre-Oscars charity event put on by The Silver Spoon and the Red Cross to support disaster relief efforts in Haiti. E! chose not to properly vet the story and instead unleashed a mocking screed against Sarah Palin loaded with defamatory assertions that require immediate corrections.  The Silver Spoon responded to the misinformation spread by this article and others like it with detailed retraction requests.  Below are statements from E! Online’s article juxtaposed with text from the release from The Silver Spoon:

E! Online:

We’re told Palin was quite the prima donna and that she insisted the suite be opened two hours early so she could come when no looky-loos would be around.

Silver Spoon:

The governor arrived with a small group about 15 minutes prior to our store’s official opening; and upon arrival, she and her entire group gave generous donations to the cause. We offered to open early to accommodate her schedule; she did not ask us to open early. (more…)

In James Gordon Meek’s article “ACORN prankster, James O’Keefe, arrested for incident at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office” of January 26th, 2010, Mr Meek twice referred to an attempt to “bug” Sen. Landrieu by James O’Keefe and three other conservative activists in New Orleans:

-The ACORN gotcha guy got popped by the FBI Tuesday on charges of bugging a Democratic senator’s office phones.

-As the bogus hardhats tried to bug an office phone, O’Keefe raised a cell phone “in his hand so as to record Flanagan and Basel,” the FBI said.

There are no allegations of any attempt to “bug” or wiretap Sen. Landrieu in the FBI affidavit, and a law enforcement official has conceded that the four men were not attempting to wiretap or intercept calls.  Furthermore, legal representation for the accused has gone on record stating there were no intentions to wiretap.

We kindly ask you to issue a correction/retraction to the story.

We have been/will be making similar requests of other news sources to correct similar errors.  Some, such as the Washington Post, MSNBC’s David Shuster, Talking Points Memo, CBS News, and the Associated Press have already posted corrections or retractions.