CNN’S FLAWED BOMBING COVERAGE RECEIVES SOME SLACK — FROM FOX NEWS

After receiving excoriating reviews from such usually sympathetic media outlets as the New York Times and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show for its coverage of the Boston marathon bombing and its aftermath, CNN found support on Monday from an unexpected source — rival Fox News. On Bill O’Reilly’s talk show Monday night, the talk-show host and contributor Bernie Goldberg defended the rival network, saying that it had made “honest mistakes.” After all, said Goldberg, it wasn’t as if CNN had “concocted these supposed facts. Not one reporter made stuff up in order to be a hero and get on the air with an exclusive.” They were instead relying on “supposedly credible sources in law enforcement” who, in the end, turned out not to be so credible. O’Reilly chimed in that CNN’s John King, who originally reported that a “dark-skinned” suspect had been taken into custody, should have identified his source after the information proved to be false. “If I were King and somebody burned me on the story, I would say here’s who burned me,” O’Reilly said. King was harder on himself than O’Reilly was. In an interview on Washington DC radio station WTOP on Tuesday, King conceded that his mistaken reporting was “embarrassing.” He said that he had two sources who had proved to be reliable in the past but who this time “had bad information. … We went with it and we had to correct it. It’s a shot to you personally, it’s a shot to your credibility.”