An Arizona news anchor has reversed her story about the White House press secretary receiving questions in advance, but some of the conservative outlets that hyped her original claim have yet to correct the record.
Breitbart's John Nolte wrote a credulous piece on Thursday about denials from the White House press corps. [...]
Nolte has yet to update his piece with any of Anaya's subsequent statements wherein she retracted her original claim. The right-wing website WND hasn't corrected its story either.
Of course they haven't. They never do. If the Breitbarts or World Net Dailies of the world had a corrections page to walk back every false story they had ever peddled, there wouldn't be any content but that. Correcting blatantly false conspiracy theories after you've put them out there is like a magician telling the audience how the trick is done, or like a snake oil salesman telling the suckers that his "medicine" is just alcohol mixed with things he finds on the bottom of his shoe.
The visitors to conspiracy-minded websites like Breitbart or WND go there to be validated. They go there to have all their worst suspicions about the Enemy confirmed, even if their worst suspicions are deeply stupid, and what people like Andrew Breitbart and Joseph Farah discovered, or at least re-discovered, is that those people are every bit as content with made-up "proof" of their own suspicions as they would be with more substantive evidence. Moreso, even, because made-up "proof," whether it means editing a tape or fudging the facts of a story beyond recognition, is a far quicker and more reliable high than stories where the truth is considerably more boring and pedestrian.
You don't tell the marks how the con is run. You tell them that they are the smartest people in the world, because only you and they can see all these very secret and very big things wiggling around behind the scenes of the world. You want your marks stupid enough to think themselves clever, and telling them that what they might have recently sincerely believed is, in fact, a load of crap is the fastest way to sow doubt in their minds about all the other loads of crap you might have been selling them.