On Tuesday, AP reporter Jesse Washington ran a story on the Phantom ‘N-Word,’ accusing Andrew Breitbart and this site of misleading viewers by running a video of the March 20 protest at Capitol Hill that did not show anyone screaming a racial epithet at the Congressional Black Caucus, as had been widely reported.   And, Washington included a new eye-witness to the supposed hate-speech, Rep. Heath Shuler (D, N.C.):

A fourth Democrat, Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, who is white, backed up his colleagues, telling the Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News that he heard the slurs.

Yesterday, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal actually did some reporting and called Rep. Shuler’s office.  He got a different story:

But when we phoned Shuler’s office this afternoon, press secretary Julie Fishman told us the local reporter misunderstood. According to Fishman, Shuler’s comments to the Times-News referred to the general tenor of the protests, not to the black congressmen’s specific allegations.  Fishman said that Shuler was not walking with Cleaver and did not hear the “N-word.”

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No clearer difference can be seen in how the Old Media and its left-wing compatriots treat mass killers, terrorists and nutjobs than the way Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Joe Stack have been portrayed by the Old Media and the left. Abdulmutallab, the jihadi Christmas Bomber, was treated as an aberration unconnected with any larger group — despite that he trained with al Qaeda — and Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, has been held up as the epitome of the “teabaggers” and the “anti-government right” despite that not a single tie to those folks has been yet discovered.

Immediately after Abdulmutallab tried to blow himself and a plane full of passengers into martyrdom on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama’s administration declared this guy an “isolated extremist” and said he had no connection to our Islamofascist enemies. Obama was helped along in this by many Old Media news sources.

On Dec. 26, for instance, CBS reported that Abdulmutallab was a loner: “As of now, he appears to be a lone actor with no conspirators. A report the following day said of the jihadist bomber, ‘We’re not aware of anybody else,’ one official told Orr. No further arrests are imminent.” (more…)