I woke up this morning to an email from Gillian Reagan, the reporter who had slammed me in a hit piece for Business Insider, defending her work and mitigating her sins, while not seeing how they all added up to an obvious hit job. Thus began a war of words that’s continued all day. Honest journalistic enterprise or partisan attack piece? You be the judge:

PART 1: Gillian Reagan’s email

Hi Andrew,

We’d like to respond to your post on Big Journalism. May we repost the entry onto BusinessInsider.com so we can respond?

Let us know how you’d like to work it out.

Best,

Gillian

—

Gillian Reagan

The Business Insider

xxx@businessinsider.com

xxx Fifth Avenue, 7th Fl

New York, NY 10003

646-xxx-xxxx

~~~~

PART 2: Blodget Response to My Piece

From Buisness Insider:

Our Response To Andrew Breitbart’s Allegations About Us And Our Story

Yesterday, we published a story about Andrew Breitbart’s new site, Big Journalism. The story contained numerous quotes from Breitbart, including this one, in which the right-leaning Breitbart was describing sites operated by the left-leaning Arianna Huffington:

“My sites offer truth,” he said, “and her sites offer leftist sin.”

We liked that quote. It was original and evocative. After we published our story, however, Breitbart called and denied ever having said such a thing.

The interview notes taken by the story’s author, Gillian Reagan, included the “leftist sin” quote, but the interview was not taped. (At her prior job, Gillian recorded all calls automatically, but we have not yet installed this technology at the Business Insider–or made a decision about whether we will). After reviewing the situation, we concluded that Gillian might have misheard Breitbard and that Breitbart might, in fact, have said “leftist spin.”

We offered to make the change. Breitbart said he didn’t care what we did. We made the change anyway. We also retracted another assertion in the original post that Breitbart had disputed, which is that he had said he doesn’t read Politico. We noted these changes in the post, and we apologized for the errors.

Relatedly, we have a content-sharing agreement with Gawker.com: We occasionally run some of Gawker’s posts and Gawker occasionally runs some of ours. The republished posts are clearly labeled as having been written and published by each site, respectively. Yesterday, Gawker decided to run our Andrew Breitbart post.

Today, in a long post at his site, Andrew Breitbart says he thinks we are just a front for Gawker–a way for Gawker editors to get interviews with people who won’t talk to Gawker anymore. We aren’t. We reached out to Breitbart because we thought his new site was relevant to the business of journalism. Gawker then decided to run the post after the fact, independently. In a separate complaint, Breitbart also objects to our use of the image of him above, because he says it makes him look insane.

We apologize again if we misquoted Andrew Breitbart, and we wish him well with his new endeavors–including his “war” with leftist media.

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PART 3: I Respond to Blodget and He Responds Back

I emailed Business Insider and they framed my email and a response into the following article:

Business Insider Blasted For “Sins Of Undisclosed Ideological Bias”

Earlier, we explained how we may have misquoted web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart yesterday. We said he had blasted Huffington Post for its “leftist sin” when instead he said “leftist spin.” We explained how, when Mr. Breitbart took issue with this, we amended the quote and apologized.

Subsequently, we received the following note from Mr. Breitbart who still believes our apparent transposition of “sin” and “spin” is evidence of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Mr. Breitbart also raises an interesting and important topic, which is whether journalists should always tape-record calls with sources and, if they do, disclose that they are tape-recording them. (For reasons we describe here, our reporter, Gillian Reagan, thought she had recorded the call when in fact she hadn’t–a fact that Mr. Breitbart also takes as evidence of bias.)

I am a jocular, secular Jew and I usually find myself quite comfortable to speak freely in interviews with New York-based in-all-likelihood left-leaning journalists like Gillian Reagan. Yet I choose my words carefully. She laughed a lot of the time, so I thought she understood I wasn’t a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal Christian (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) That’s why the central offense of Ms. Reagan’s article bothers me so: I don’t speak in “truth” — “sin” language.

“‘Truth’ and ‘sin'” represent a distinct Christian outlook and I am not a Christian. I recall saying my sites will tell “truths the mainstream media refuse to cover.” I likely said Arianna’s site mostly offers “leftie spin.” Putting the term ‘truth’ which I believe I used in a completely different context to grant the manipulated “truth-sin” construct is clearly a greater journalistic “sin” than the one offered by your correction/clarification.

The photo and the provocative writing style represent a very Gawker-like approach to the subject matter as well. So seeing the piece later on Gawker was very clarifying. The photo that Business Insider chose to run puts the false “truth-sin” dichotomy into hyperdrive to make me look like an angry “Christinist” — to quote Charles Johnson and Andrew Sullivan, who are leading the charge to make all dissent of President Obama and liberal government expansion appear to be coming from “extremist” religious quarters. (It also reflects the administrations attitudes, too. See Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security report on domestic terror threats. This meme is trying at best, and dangerous at worst given the real terror threats posed by radical Islam, but I digress.)

I also told Ms. Reagan how in helping create Huffington Post I can now recognize that the ideas represented at the New York Times and the Huffington Post affirm what most already know and that is the New York Times is provably a left of center operation. Huffpo granted the perspective readers needed to make that determination. Their ideological outlook is a DNA match.

Had I read up on Ms. Reagan and saw her attempted take-down of Matt Drudge, a person for whom I have immense respect, I wouldn’t have taken the call in the first place. My bad. Hers was a hit-piece. I assume you are sophisticated enough in this racket to see this was her intention from the word go.

What I find most egregious today in your response is how you brush off the tape-recording aspect of the story. She never told me she was taping. And when I confronted her on the falsehoods she jumped to the “I taped it card.” Without missing a beat I told her, “Good, I want to hear it,” or words to that effect, and that “I want others to hear it, too.”

I can’t prove it, but in the thirty seconds she fumbled to answer and came up empty, I felt I had successfully called her bluff. I believe strongly that she lied when confronted thinking I wouldn’t ask for the tape to be made public. Her voice showed serious concern in the 30-seconds. But, again, I can’t prove it.

What I am starting to see over and over again is a fundamental lack of acknowledgment that young journalists with a liberal outlook want to please their liberal bosses. At no point is anyone taking responsibility for the “sins” of undisclosed “ideological bias” in any newsroom when it’s the elephant in the middle of the room. To not acknowledge that the series of “errors” and picture choice add up to an attempt to take down an ideological foe a notch or two is a symbol of what’s killing the publishing industry.

Millions see it — and flee.

Perhaps you should take that into consideration if you want to stay in business, or join the HuffPo in the open embrace of ideological reporting.

Andrew,

Thanks for the note.

As I said in our response, if Gillian misquoted you as saying “leftist sin” instead of “leftist spin,” we apologize. Based on my dealings with Gillian to date, I don’t think there was any ideological basis for the error. The words do sound pretty similar, especially in the context of a jovial conversation.

The recording of calls is an interesting topic. Based on a quick survey of our newsroom, several folks who come from traditional media organizations say this is standard practice for all calls. It’s standard practice in certain divisions of Wall Street firms, as well. The obvious benefit of such a practice is that it eliminates (or at least drastically reduces) disputes like this. As I noted in the response, we don’t yet have a company-wide policy about recording, but we’ll disclose it clearly on the site if and when we do.

Based on my daily reading and editing of the Business Insider, I don’t think we lean politically one way or the other. We have some raging conservative free-market types (e.g., John Carney), some libertarians (Joe Weisenthal), some tech folks who couldn’t care less about politics (Dan Frommer), and some bleeding-heart liberals (Erin Geiger-Smith, Nick Saint). Overall, however, the focus and viewpoint of the site is business, not politics. As most of our readers will attest, we take swings at anyone we think deserves it, regardless of party.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I voted for President Obama. I’m not happy with many decisions his administration has made–most notably those of his finance and Treasury team–but overall I remain a big fan. However, that doesn’t stop me–or us–from calling him out when he’s a bonehead.)

I, too, have great respect for Matt Drudge. He’s one of the pioneers of this medium, and he continues to show us and everyone else how it’s done.

Best of luck with your site.

Henry

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In two separate memos to his readers, Blodget completely avoids the “I taped the call… whoops, I didn’t tape the call.” Why is that?

Also, now that Business Insider has corrected the Christianist-meme slur against me, known as the publisher of right-leaning publications, he transfers my heretical ass into the other convenient place for leftist-media types wanting to marginalize their political enemies: the “conspiracy” camp.

Blodget wrongly distills my carefully chosen words into a statement that I provide “evidence of a vast left-wing conspiracy.” For the record, I am describing a “culture” of newsroom left-leaning conformity, not a coordinated, secret “Soros & Bones” society. Though John Podesta and George Soros certainly do their best to convey that there’s something secret, well-funded and nefarious going on.

To deny that New York-based magazine and newspapers, other than those few openly conservative ones, are anything but liberal in mindset is “crazy,” and that is what Mr. Blodget has done providing a convenient and timely reinforcement for why we launched Big Journalism.