Colby Hall, the founding editor of the far-left media site Mediaite, is out after a 30-day suspension for, among other things, fabricating quotes.
In the middle of last month, Mediaite’s editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo announced Hall’s suspension.
“We presented the findings to Colby Hall, who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of AI,” DePaolo wrote. “Regardless, it is completely unacceptable, and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”
What was fascinating is that Hall was exposed by his ideological counterparts in the far-left media. From my earlier report:
On Monday, the far-left media outlet Status told Semafor that One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.”
Semafor further reports that since its launch, One Sheet has serially misattributed quotes to the wrong people and outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Status, and Politico. In other words, those dumb enough to pay for One Sheet were misinformed about who said what. Hell, I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to read Mediaite for free.
Semafor summed it up as a “series of mishaps… including misattributed information and made-up quotes.”
Apparently, DePaolo’s “further investigation” didn’t come out too well for Hall because Hall has announced he’s out at Mediaite to spend more time with his Substack.
“After 15 years as Founding Editor of Mediaite, I’m stepping away from the site I helped launch, and that has been my obsession for well over a decade,” he announced last week. “The decision follows the editorial errors in the One Sheet newsletter that surfaced in April. I addressed those mistakes on the record at the time, and I stand by what I said then.”
He then spun the 30-day suspension as a plus. “What I didn’t expect, when the suspension started in April, was that the past month would turn out to be one of the most clarifying experiences of my professional life,” he said. “It also gave my brain a chance to do something it hadn’t done in a long while: rest.”
He does admit that the suspension was “about as dark as anything I’ve gone through professionally.” But it was still good because he realized “I’d been running on fumes for longer than I wanted to admit, and that some of what I thought was professional rigor was actually just exhaustion dressed up as urgency.” Whatever that means.
We all make mistakes, and out of humility and even self-preservation, we need to show some grace when others make those mistakes. Making up quotes doesn’t sound like a mistake. You can accidentally plagiarize by not indenting a paragraph. I’ve done that. You can accidentally misattribute a quote. I’ve done that. The thing, though, is that after you make those errors, you know you’re prone to making those errors, so you’re extra careful about double-checking. Fabricating quotes, though?
Now, Hall says, he plans to do some consulting and disappear into that massive pile of Substack with the rest of the disgraced, like Jim Acosta and Taylor Lorenz and Ryan Lizza and Terry Moran…
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