Is ‘trolling the press’ part of an official job description at Isengard on the Potomac?
If not, it should be.
Tricking Newsweek into reporting something that's been reported about 10,000 other times (but by the auslander press, so it's not as if any of the Evil Party base will have read it), and then going "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean what I said" may have been a clever trick the first time that the Evil Party pulled it on a member of the SCLM, but this is, what, the 20th or so time this exact same stunt has been pulled? One would think that after CBS got nailed for reporting something that was true, anyone else relying on information that's even slightly related to Maximum Leader Genius would tell their anonymous Whitehouse source "Now, Karl, we love you like a father, but you have to understand that if you doublecross us we're going to publish every fucking word of conversation we've ever had with you, and we'll make a handy list of every bit of anonymous information you've passed us." Sure, that would be the last time that that particular paper ever got a bit of information from the B*sh junta, but even if the information isn't false, it's still useless because Karl will cheerfully reel it back in as soon as anyone chomps on the line.
Is there something in the air in Washington, DC that makes you want to trust the evil fascists who took over this country, or has the mainstream press just become so lazy that they aren't willing to hire reporters who know how to look for a story? I fully expect that when the United States economy collapses and the west coast secedes from the train wreck, that the wingnut brigade will be collapsing in hysterial hissy fits because the COMMUNIST Denver Post is reporting on the war going on on the Nevada frontier, instead of reporting the Good! News! about the Coward in Chief blessing the tobacco harvest in North Carolina.