About That Jon Stewart Strike Item...

Earlier this week, I reported that Jon Stewart had told employees of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report that he would pay their salaries through the first two weeks of the Writers Guild strike. Several hours after publishing my item, Stewart's spokesman returned my call for comment and denied that Stewart had made any such arrangements; I immediately added his denial to my story.

Since then, I've been trying to find additional sources to confirm or clarify the information from my original source, but without success. Therefore, I'm retracting the report, with apologies.

In light of how much attention this story has gotten, I feel some explanation is in order. Obviously, the orthodox journalistic thing to do -- and the correct one, in retrospect -- would have been to wait for a comment from Stewart's rep before posting anything. (I had already heard back from Comedy Central's spokesman, but he was unable to confirm or deny.)

There are several reasons I was quicker to post than I might have been in other circumstances. The first was the strength of my source. It was someone I've known for many years, and know to be extremely well-informed about, and well-connected within, the entertainment business. He had no agenda to serve relative to Stewart, Comedy Central or the strike. And the information he conveyed to me had an extremely short chain of evidence; it wasn't a rumor that had been passed around and potentially garbled in the retelling. It was specific and credible, as the Department of Homeland Security likes to say.

Moreover, it passed the sniff test. Certain types of rumors automatically arouse suspicion: damaging stories potentially started by a rival or disgruntled ex-employee, or salary details leaked to influence a negotiation. This wasn't such a scenario. The only person likely to make up a story about Jon Stewart's generosity is his publicist -- and he's the one who denied it. Besides, Stewart has a reputation as a general mensch, and, as I pointed out in the item, he's on record as a strong supporter of labor. It all seemed to fit.

So here I have a story I believe to be accurate, and I'm waiting for confirmation. This is where I made my error in judgment. Stewart's rep is based on the West Coast, so I knew it would probably be several hours before he responded. What I didn't know was whether he would decline to comment (as is most often the case in stories involving pay or personnel), or stall me to preserve the scoop for a preferred outlet (another common occurrence), or pass me onto someone else, as Comedy Central's rep had.

Meanwhile, the strike is the major news event of the week. Every major paper and network is running story after story about it. Since I believed my source's tip, I also believed that dozens of people at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report must have known about the arrangement, in which case it would surely only be a matter of hours before the story broke elsewhere. So I pulled the trigger, prematurely.

Why haven't I set the record straight until now? For a simple reason: Publicists lie. Not all of them, and not all the time, but often enough that any journalist knows not to drop a story just because a publicist says it ain't so. I wanted to get another party's confirmation or denial, rather than compound my original error by rushing out with a retraction that itself might end up needing to be recanted.

One of the defining qualities of the blog medium is its ability to flesh out an incomplete nugget of information incrementally, in real time, before the reader's eyes. A lot of major stories have been broken by bloggers who were willing to say "Here's what we think we know, and here's what we'd like to know," and then let readers or other bloggers fill in the blanks. (Two obvious examples: Rathergate and the Attorneys General scandal.) But for this type of journalism to function properly requires transparency and accountability on the part of its practitioners. I hope I've provided some here.

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