Who's Actually Moving?

A number of readers flagged George Stephanopoulos' appearance on World News Tonight last night, in which he seemed to suggest that Obama had moved toward McCain's position on more troops for Afghanistan, when in fact as we all know it was McCain who last week changed positions and basically adopted the Obama policy prescription. Now I see that Media Matters is calling out ABC on it, too. Maybe I come at this from a slightly different angle because the initial reports from readers were that Stephanopoulos claimed Obama had taken McCain's position on Afghanistan. So when I first saw the video myself, it fell short of being as egregious an error as I had expected: It's a terribly awkward and essentially misleading construction that Stephanopoulos uses three times there to describe the Bush-McCain collapse on key policies toward... [read full story]