Retraction Requests: Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs

Just a couple of hours ago, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs issued an update to his post “James O’Keefe’s Race Problems” of February 3rd, which had spread the lie that James O’Keefe attended a “white nationalist convention” (Johnson diligently sourced this characterization of the “Race and Conservatism” debate to the website, One People’s Project). To his credit, Johnson demands in his update that One People’s Project put up an uncropped picutre of O’Keefe “manning a table of racist literature” or shut up:

More importantly, it’s now incumbent on One People’s Project to put up the goods if they have them. They should release an uncropped version of the picture they said shows O’Keefe manning a table of racist literature, or they should retract that claim because they can’t prove it.

But earlier in the post, Mr. Johnson declares that it was incorrect for Dave Weigel to attribute the phrase “white nationalist conference” to him:

True, Mr. Johnson, but these are also your exact words:

While it is true Mr. Johnson did not use the precise phrase “white nationalist convention” as was noted in Weigel’s article, he said something very similar in the comments of his blog. In this case, Mr. Johnson does not attribute his claim that O’Keefe attended a “meeting of white nationalists” to anyone.

We hope that Mr. Johnson, an influential presence in the blogosphere, will issue a retraction without playing the semantics game with the words “meeting” and “conference,” but just in case, from dictionary.com:

In addition, his claim O’Keefe was “a friend” of Marcus Epstein is false. In an interview with BigJournalism.com, James O’Keefe denied Mr. Johnson’s claim, which, again, is unattributed. As was hashed out here, there is no factual basis for Johnson to imply a close link between O’Keefe and Epstein:

During the brief time O’Keefe and Epstein were working for the Leadership Institute concurrently (by O’Keefe’s estimate, this lasted three months or less), they were two of more than a hundred staffers. Mr. Epstein was one of approximately 60 field representatives and was assigned to South Carolina. O’Keefe and Epstein have had no other connections before or since. Asking readers to hold Mr. O’Keefe accountable for the attitudes and actions of one of his more than one hundred co-workers is irresponsible.

We kindly request retractions to both statements.