| Saturday Oct. 4, 2003; 10:39 a.m. EDT
NY Times Retracts Arnold Hitler Bombshell The New York Times issued a defacto retraction on Saturday
after misreporting two days earlier that Arnold Schwarzenegger once said
he admired Adolf Hitler for what he did with his power.
In early Friday editions, the so-called paper of record quoted the
California gubernatorial front-runner as saying, "I admire [Hitler] for
being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it."
Schwarzenegger's critics used the toxic quote to suggest he approved of
the Holocaust.
But an actual transcript of outtakes from Schwarzenegger's 1975
bodybuilding classic "Pumping Iron" shows that what the actor actually
said was exactly the opposite: "I didn't admire [Hitler] for what he did
with it."
The incendiary Schwarzenegger quote was corrected by the film's
producer George Butler during an interview Friday where he admitted he
misquoted the GOP frontrunner in a 1997 book proposal.
Butler told the Times that the error stemmed from the fact that the
book proposal quote, which was widely circulated after the Times and ABC
News published the bogus story, had "dropped a few words."
The full and corrected Schwarzenegger quote, which was printed by the
Times on Saturday, went like this:
"In many ways I admired people — It depends for what. I admired Hitler
for instance because he came from being a little man with almost no formal
education, up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public
speaker and for his way of getting to the people and so on.
"But I didn't admire him for what he did with it. It is very hard to
say who I admired and who are my heroes. And I admired basically people
who are powerful people, like Kennedy. Who people listen to and just wait
until he comes out with telling them what to do. People like that I admire
a lot."
Butler couldn't explain how he made the mistake, telling the Times, "I
am amazed that something like that escaped me."
But what's perhaps more amazing is that the Times, ABC News and the
rest of the mainstream press ran wih a bogus story they knew could severly
damage Schwarzenegger's reputation without verifying the poisonous
quote. |
________________________________
Changes to your subscription (unsubs, nomail, digest) can be made by going to http://sandboxmail.net/mailman/listinfo/sndbox_sandboxmail.net
