Read along as The New York Observer’s Steve Kornacki applies a little egg to the Daily News’s face over a so-far-so-untrue claim that appeared in the paper’s pages last week.
Rudy Giuliani, the big scoop went, had decided to challenge Kirsten Gillibrand for her U.S. Senate seat next year and would announce his candidacy “in the next 48 hours.”
120 hours later (and counting), the world is still waiting to hear from Rudy. And as the minutes, hours and days pass, the scoop is feeling more and more like a red herring.
All we know, for now, is that there was a Daily News report (citing a single, unnamed source) last Thursday afternoon that he former mayor was certain to enter the race. Then the story changed, saying only that Rudy was “very likely” to run, and dropping the 48-hour claim.
Tough.
But wait a sec: The bottom of the piece includes the speculation that Giuliani’s ally spoke with the Daily News so as to make his “old nemesis, the Times, … look like it had missed out on a big scoop.”
Juicy! But also a bit illogical. Following Kornacki’s framing, the News only looked like it had a worthy scoop for, at most, a couple of days. If the whole Rudy To Run thing is indeed fantasy, then it rebounds to the Times‘s credit that they didn’t run this “scoop” that wasn’t, no matter what ricochet revenge Kornacki posits Giuliani serving to the Times.
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.