TV News LIES

"Scott Prouty." The fellow on the other end of the phone call pronounced his name with hesitation. For nearly a fortnight, he and I had been building a long-distance rapport via private tweets, emails, and phone conversations as we discussed how best to make public the secret video he had shot of Mitt Romney talking at a private, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida.

Now I was almost ready to break the story at Mother Jones. I had verified the video, confirming when and where it had been shot, and my colleagues and I had selected eight clips—including Romney's now-infamous remarks about the 47 percent of Americans he characterized as "victims" unwilling to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives"—to embed in two articles.

Venezuela is to set up a formal inquiry into claims that the late President Hugo Chavez's cancer was the result of poisoning by his enemies abroad.

Foes of the government view the accusation as a typical Chavez-style conspiracy theory intended to feed fears of "imperialist" threats to Venezuela's socialist system and distract people from daily problems.

Still, acting President Nicolas Maduro vowed to open an investigation into the claims, first raised by Chavez himself after he was diagnosed with the disease in 2011.

Gunmen shot dead an online journalist while he ate at a taco stand in the Mexican town of Ojinaga, which lies across the border from Presidio, Texas, authorities said Monday.

Jaime Gonzalez Dominguez’s news website, Ojinaga Noticias, reported that the 38-year-old journalist was shot at least 18 times with an assault rifle Sunday afternoon. The gunmen stole his camera and a woman who was with him was not wounded in the attack, it said.

Twitter is afire with thoughts on the Woodward-Politico-Gene Sperling imbroglio. How amazingly shallow this whole thing is can't be overstated. If you've not yet read the emails, here they are. Sperling:

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start.

Tony Blair has told how people are still “very abusive” to him 10 years after the Iraq War, adding that he has given up trying to “persuade people it was the right decision”.

In comments which could be interpreted as self-pitying Mr Blair said that it did not matter whether the continuing controversy about Iraq had “taken a toll on me”. He said that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was “20 times as bad” as Syria’s President Assad but admitted that it would take a “generation” to make Iraq safer than it was in 2003.

Two foundations that have been described as "the dark money ATM of the right" have spent more than $1 million combined funding a non-profit organization whose primary function is distributing libertarian education materials featuring Fox Business host John Stossel.

Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, the affiliated funding groups, were until recently obscure entities. But over the past month a series of reports have detailed how those organizations have paid out more than $400 million to over 1,000 conservative groups since their 1999 founding. Those reports have described how the two organizations have allowed wealthy individuals to discreetly underwrite trending conservative causes like climate change denial.