Ben Smith stepped in it; or, depending how you look at it, he took the bait.
Smith broke the story that John Edwards would be suspending his campaign. Of course, that turned out to be completely WRONG.
He explains himself here:
A single, confident source close to John Edwards told me this morning that Edwards was "suspending his campaign," and I posted it to the blog at 11:06 this morning.
My source, and I, were wrong.
The source, whose anonymity I agreed to respect, spoke of the kind of grim prognosis Elizabeth Edwards herself just described hearing before a second round of tests came back. I trusted the source, somebody I've known for several years, and who has always been reliable.
And with less than an hour before Edwards was to announce, I unwisely wrote the item without getting a second source.
When the campaign pushed back harder than I'd expected, I added that information to the original item, but that doesn't undo the damage.
My apologies to our readers for passing on bad information.
I'm not carrying water for Politico or Ben Smith.
But before the news conference, the networks were basically saying the thing -- that the campaign was likely to be on hold because of Elizabeth Edwards' health.
CBS ran with the incorrect story.
Brian Williams on NBC backtracked after cutting away from the news conference. He said that when coming on the air, they believed that Mrs. Edwards had a health setback and the campaign would be suspended or Edwards would drop out completely.
Williams said that they got part of it right.
Politico was the source, but it was not the only outlet to run with the bad information.
In terms of getting it wrong, it was Election 2000 night déjà vu.
It's not as if this sort of thing hasn't happened before.
It's not like Smith concocted a story with forged documents or set out to destroy Edwards' political future.
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