Rachel Maddow needs to fess up

I really thought Rachel Maddow was someone I could respect. Sure, I disagree with her on a lot of issues, but she has been courteous and fair to the other side. She also eagerly issues corrections when factual errors creep into her show, which will happen to the best of us.

Or so I thought.

Maddow reported that the Koch brothers were pushing a law to drug test welfare recipients in Florida. Her team screwed up when they asked the Koch legal team about it at the last minute and went ahead with the story anyways. The email exchange between them does not make the MSNBC host look good at all.

The weak connection is that the Koch brothers gave $40,000 over the course of several years to the State Policy Network, which is an organization of think tanks. That group gave some money at one point to a think tank that backed the drug tests. In her reporting, the Koch brothers were the masterminds of the drug tests.

What's funny is that Watchdog.org, a Koch-connected site, was quick to point out that the Koch brothers have given $20 million to the ACLU which opposed the drug tests in court. Meanwhile MSNBC's parent company has also given money to the State Policy Network, making her just as involved as the Koch Brothers.

But that's the Koch side of the story, what does Maddow and her supporters say? Apparently, they say to double down, which is exactly what she did.

Media Matters did not even try to defend her and stayed silent on the push back, which is smart because Politifact rated her claim as Mostly False.

Does Maddow hope this will just go away? She made her criticism of the drug test laws, which have major flaws and are costly, all about Koch involvement when there is no evidence that the Koch brothers pushed them. This tells us a lot about her and the way she deals with her own mistakes.

By the way, this blog has never received any money from the Koch brothers. That's not by choice, however. Come on David and Charles, help a young man get ahead.