But it’s okay, because it doesn’t make the war sound as bad.
Over at the New Nebraska Network, Don Kuhns shares a letter he wrote in which the World Herald’s editors changed data on the cost of the Iraq war:
The editing job you did on my last letter contained an error that cannot be ignored. The sentence you altered was this:
“According to the Congressional Research Service, we now spend approximately $328 million per day in Iraq.”
You changed that factual statement into this false statement:
“We are spending tens of millions of dollars daily on Iraq.”
Since when is it the job of an editor to change a completely reasonable, accurate, and easily verifiable statement into one that is demonstrably false?
I could understand wanting to perhaps adjust a hyperbolic account of spending to something more precise and verifiable, but Kuhns obviously started out precise and cited his source.