ABC Doesn't Know How to Play the Game

For me, the most interesting thing about John Kiriakou's offhand acknowledgment that his pants are on fire (about the effectiveness of waterboarding) is that evidently ABC--the network that ran with Kiriakou's fantasy allegations in the first place--has known that it was a dog's breakfast for a long time. They dealt with it the same way you'd expect the CEO of MegaCorp to deal with the news that he'd just deployed company money to buy his mistress an executive jet: they tucked it into a plane brown envelope and slipped it under the door, trusting that before anybody actually got to read it, the janitor would have tossed it away.

What's so remarkable about the ABC response is that it is so amateurish. This is journalism, after all: the name of the game is "shameless." Recall how Grandmaster William Randolph Hearst dealt with the Brooklyn Bridge. The Hearst Newspapers drummed up a pandemic of hysteria about supposed engineering/construction defects in the city's latest adornment. Then when a city engineer hauled them in and proved by chapter and verse that there stories were all a farrago of falsehoods, the Hearst papers ran with the headline:

Good News! The Bridge is Safe!

So, go for it ABC. Run with the climbdown and enjoy the ill-gotten spinoff from your own prior irresponsibility.