Internet abuzz over Reuters story killed after White House complaint

US blogs have been abuzz over the story, which suggested President Obama would cut the US budget deficit through backdoor taxes on the middle class.

Media Matters said the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh “was very excited about a Reuters article that was so riddled with errors that the wire service withdrew it after it was released”. 

Business Insider quoted the offending story, filed on Monday, in part: While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.

The White House complained about inaccuracies in the story and Reuters withdrew it, saying a replacement story would be coming later in the week. Later it said the story was wrong and there would be no substitute.

Business Insider said it was told by a Reuters representative that the story was withdrawn “due to significant errors of fact…The story was wrong on multiple points and should not have gone out.”

Talking Points Memo Livewire said “Obama administration aides appealed to the Reuters White House reporting team to kill a story by another reporter of the news service that suggested the president’s new budget blueprint included ‘backdoor’ tax hikes”. An administration official said the Reuters White House team “worked to quickly remedy the situation and helped get the story completely withdrawn”.

The discredited backdoor taxes story was noticed by The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog. And The Christian Science Monitor commented: “It says something about the state of partisanship in America when the biggest budget story of the day is a nonstory. Literally.”

The media blog Gawker pointed out that it was the second story Reuters had killed in as many months “but, on the bright side, the first actually bad one”. In December a story about a billionaire hedge fund manager was spiked after he complained to Thomson Reuters’ markets division chief executive Devin Wenig. ■