ABC’s Jonathan Karl And The Proof The White House Memo Wasn’t Just About Benghazi

ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who was previously burned when he pushed falsehoods about CIA talking points generated in the wake of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, is now adopting the conservative distortion of a separate set of talking points authored by the White House for media appearances by then U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

On September 16, 2012, Rice appeared on the Sunday political talk shows and suggested that the Benghazi terror attacks had grown out of spontaneous protests like those that were occurring worldwide in response to an anti-Muslim video. Conservatives have claimed that Rice’s comments on the Sunday shows were part of a deliberate effort to deceive the American people about the cause of the terror attacks, to bolster President Obama’s re-election campaign. This effort has often involved distorting the CIA-approved talking points that Rice used to prepare for the interviews.

Karl came under fire in May 2013 after reporting that the network had “reviewed” emails from administration officials regarding the creation and editing of those CIA-generated talking points. While nothing Karl reported undermined assertions from the CIA that the intelligence community had approved those talking points, Karl suggested that the emails bolstered the conservative critique of the administration’s response.

In fact, Karl had never seen the emails in question — his story was based on “summaries” of the emails and “detailed notes” from a source who, it turned out, had misrepresented what the documents actually said. After media observers slammed Karl’s “sloppy” reporting, ABC News issued a statement saying that the network “should have been more precise in its sourcing of those quotes, attributing them to handwritten copies of the emails taken by a Congressional source. We regret that error.” Karl himself apologized in a statement to CNN.

Now Karl is returning to the subject of talking points used to prepare Rice for those September 16, 2012, interviews, seizing on a separate email authored by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes that was released yesterday. The email details “Goals” and “Top-lines” for Rice’s interviews and provides sample questions and answers.

Conservatives have fixated on one of Rhodes’ recommendations for the interviews, detailing one of the goals as “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an internet video and not a broader failure of policy.” Conservatives claim this is evidence the White House was seeking to deliberately mislead the public by blaming Benghazi on the anti-Muslim video rather than terrorism in the region.

In what Mediaite described as a “heated back and forth” during the April 30 White House Press Briefing, Karl hyped this false attack, repeatedly challenging White House Press Secretary Jay Carney over the Rhodes email and Rice’s interviews.

During their exchange, Carney sought to make clear that the Rhodes email was not just about the Benghazi attacks but was a more extensive document detailing the situation in the Middle East more broadly, and thus that the comment that “these protests are rooted in an internet video” was not about Benghazi specifically. According to Carney, Rice depended on the CIA talking points for information on Benghazi and the White House talking points for other topics.

Conservative media have been quick to use the exchange to attack Carney and the White House. But the White House documents upon which Karl based his misleading questions support Carney’s argument.

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