Earlier today in this report, ABC News announced that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was involved in the Congressional bribery investigation. Hastert's people have denied that he is a target of the investigation and they are demanding a retraction. The Department of Justice has issued a statement stating flatly that "Speaker Hastert is not under investigation by the Justice Department." ABC has since issued this item which in essence stands by its story but suggests that people are reading more into it than is there.
In other maybe-it's-true news, Truthout (an online left-wing news journal) is standing by its story that Karl Rove has already been indicted…this, despite the fact that the timetable in the original story has already been proven wrong, that no one else seems to have any information to this effect, and that it has been categorically denied by Rove's lawyers.
I have no idea what truth (if any) there is to either story. Perhaps there is none, perhaps they're essentially true but wrong in some technicality that allows them to be honestly denied. As usual for this kind of questionable report, people who want to see Rove frog-marched and Hastert hopping along beside him are cautiously hoping it's so…and folks whose politics would be set back a few yards if those things happened are sure they're not so. The latter group may be right but I think most of them are wrong about one thing. Most of them are saying these are deliberate, politically-motivated lies on the parts of the reporters and/or their news agencies.
That's a ridiculous assumption. They may be politically-motivated lies on the part of whoever leaked the stories to the media, but the media — even a fringe outfit like Truthout — doesn't make such things up out of the whole cloth. Somebody told them these accounts and it was probably someone they had reason to believe, albeit by a low or flawed standard of faith. If the stories are wrong, the crime is bad journalism, not intentional lying. One reason there's so much inept reporting out there is that it so rarely gets called what it is, which is incompetence.