Yesterday brought the stunning news that Intercept staffer Juan Thompson had “fabricated several quotes in his stories and created fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people,” according to Intercept Editor in Chief Betsy Reed in a remarkably forthcoming “note to readers.” Via corrections and a retraction, the Intercept cleaned up the mess and declared, “We apologize to the subjects of the stories; to the people who were falsely quoted; and to you, our readers. We are contacting news outlets that picked up the corrected stories to alert them to the problems.”
The problems are particularly acute in the case of this Thompson piece: “Dylann Roof’s cousin claims love interest chose black man over him.” The “scoop” landed in a churning news environment just one day after Dylann Roof allegedly killed nine black churchgoers in an historic church in Charleston, South Carolina.
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