Topic: Newsmax
A May 31 NewsMax article reports on CNN anchor Lou Dobb's rebuttal to a New York Times article on him that Dobbs called a "scurrilous personal attack." But nowhere does NewsMax mention the key claim made in the Times article: that Dobbs repeated a false claim about the number of leprosy cases in the U.S.
Perhaps that's because if it did, NewsMax would have to admit its own errors. As we've detailed, NewsMax columnists George Putnam, Diane Alden and "Medicine Men" Michael Arnold Glueck and Robert J. Cihak have repeatedly cited that false statistic -- that there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the past three years (in fact, that's the number for the past 30 years). Indeed, on the same edition of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" in which he responded to the Times article, Dobbs admitted his mistake on the leprosy statistic, saying of its source, Madeleine Cosman: "The fact is, I made a mistake, and I've said we would never have used her as a source if we had known of her controversial background." NewsMax didn't report this, either.
Will NewsMax continue to pretend its writers didn't promote a falsehood, or will it step up and admit -- and, more importantly, correct -- their mistakes?
