Let’s go into the fact-checking department. [Beauchamp's wife] Elspeth Reeve was one of three fact-checkers at the magazine.
Did she fact-check her husband’s articles? While it is hard to believe that an established magazine would make such an elementary error, so far no one at the magazine has bothered to address the question. That’s an interesting omission.
Even if Reeve did not double-check her husband’s reporting, she worked alongside the other two fact-checkers and often shared a take-out lunch with them in the magazine’s conference room.
She... had lunch with some of her co-workers! Truly, an enormous scandal. Similarly, I've heard rumors that Dick Miniter once had lunch with Roger Simon and Glenn Reynolds, so clearly his piece wasn't fact-checked at all! And the scandal deepens:
Perhaps the fact-checkers believed that they didn’t have to check his work thoroughly because they knew and trusted his wife, who they affectionately called “Ellie.”Clearly, we know that TNR committed journalistic malpractice because they called the wife of the person whose article was under review... by her name. I'm convinced! It's entirely possible (although, the assumptions of this story aside, it's hardly been proven with any publicly available evidence) that Beauchamp made up the entire story, but this is pretty feeble stuff. I am looking forward to the story about how that journalistic beacon Pajamas Media was suckered into a laughably false story that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had died, though...--Scott Lemieux
