Last night, MSNBC scrubbed a paragraph about alcohol from an online article about Cheney’s hunting accident:
Now, they’ve restored the paragraph, slightly reworked:
In a recorded, on-the-record phone call with NBC News, Armstrong said that beer may have been available at lunch that day. “If someone wants to help themselves to a beer,” she said, “they may, but I did not see anyone do that,” Armstrong says. She says she was not sure if there were beers in the coolers but wasn’t ready to rule it out: “There may be a beer or two in there, but remember not everyone in the party was shooting,” she told NBC News.
The story also now suggests that the White House misled MSNBC about whether Cheney had consumed alcohol. A new paragraph from the revised article:
NBC News called the vice president’s office for comment four times Tuesday and Wednesday and asked whether the vice president or anyone in the hunting party had consumed any alcohol on Saturday prior to the accident. In an e-mail statement Wednesday to NBC News, the vice president’s press secretary referred NBC News to the Kenedy County Sheriff’s Department report on the incident.
The sheriff’s report says “there was no alcohol…involved in the incident.” Cheney told Brit Hume that he drank beer prior to the accident.
Question: Did the White House pressure MSNBC to remove the paragraph last night?