Just when the Pogrebin/Kelly hit piece on Justice Kavanaugh couldn’t seem any more desperate, it hits a new low.

Here’s the latest twist as documented by fake news media headlines.

“Did Brett Kavanaugh ask New York Times reporters to lie in their book? Yeah, pretty much” – Washington Post

That one’s typical.

As Becket Adams notes at the Examiner, the truth is a lot more complicated. Here’s his recapitulation of the second version of their claim.

On Thursday, in a subsequent interview with the Hill’s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Pogrebin and Kelly retold the tale of trying to wrangle an interview out of Kavanaugh. They told mostly the same version of events. But not quite.

“I think you suggested in a recent interview that Brett Kavanaugh said he would talk to you but only if you wrote that he didn’t talk to you. Did he just say he would talk to you off-the-record or did he actually say that?” asked Enjeti.

“You know,” responded Pogrebin, “we had back-and-forth negotiations with him and a representative where we were kinda’ trying to come to terms on this.”

She added, “Unfortunately, they wanted a line in that actually said he declined to comment and we felt that would have misled the readers.”

Kelly said in agreement, “They asked us to affirmatively say Justice Kavanaugh declined to be interviewed for the book even if we had an off-the-record discussion with him.”

That sounds the same to a lot of people, but media types know better.

It sounds like Justice Kavanaugh wanted it to be made clear that he did not give an on-the-record interview. He was potentially willing to talk about it off-the-record.

He wanted it to be absolutely clear that he was not speaking to them in any way that could be cited or quoted by them.

Not only wasn’t Kavanaugh asking them to lie, he was taking precautions to prevent them from trying to use anything he said to them, if they chose to lie to him about it being off-the-record.

Kavanaugh was protecting himself against deceit from Pogrebin and Kelly. But the media instead chose to misrepresent this as Kavanaugh asking them to lie. As if the media doesn’t know the difference between an off-the-record conversation and an interview.

Pogrebin repeated herself, saying again for the audience: “He said that we had to have a line in there saying we didn’t speak to him.”

The moderator, National Public Radio’s Alison Fitzgerald Kodjak, interjected to clarify for the Times reporter, “[Kavanaugh] declined to be interviewed … as a condition for being interviewed.”

The media’s fake news problem is becoming a threat to our political system. It is the central disinformation campaign in this country.