Slow news day?

One of the items in today’s Slate begins:

Bush Speech Bush Speech
Popping a spring in Saginaw.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004, at 12:37 PM PT

President Bush gave a speech today in Saginaw, Mich., in which, judging from the White House transcript, he repeated whole paragraphs twice, like a malfunctioning Stepford wife.

The column then goes on to give four examples — but then, the author continues:

I’m told by a reporter who was there that this was some sort of hiccup in the White House transcription, and that Bush did not actually give lengthy portions of the same speech twice. The repetitions do not appear in the transcript prepared by the Federal News Service, a private company.

What I can’t figure out, though, is why the botched White House transcript shows occasional slight differences in the first and second versions of the repeated text. “The issues vary, the challenges are different every day” becomes two (more grammatical) sentences on the second go-round: “The issues vary. The challenges are different every day.” The phrase “blow in the wind” becomes “blow in the winds.” The line, “A President must follow the—must not follow the path of the latest polls” gets applause the first time, and no applause when it’s repeated. The same thing happens with “A President must lead based on conviction and conscience.”

This isn’t machine error. It’s human error. Did a White House transcriber pop a spring?

I’m not sure I quite get it. The column begins by speculating that President Bush is behaving mightly oddly. Yes, it does say “judging from the White House transcript,” but certainly my first impression was that the author thinks the transcript was indeed accurate. And otherwise the matter hardly seems terribly newsworthy, no? (Yes, I know that I blog about pickled herring and who knows what else, but Slate for obvious reasons tends to stick to more generally interesting items.)

But then it turns out that the eyewitness account suggests that President Bush wasn’t remotely “like a malfunctioning Stepford Wife,” but that there was a transcription glitch. I suppose there’s some innuendo that perhaps the transcript is accurate, but, boy, this is mightly slim evidence, especially when one has squarely contrary testimony from someone who was actually present (and presumably a trustworthy professional, who probably would have noticed the speaker repeating four separate paragraphs). Where’s the news about that?

Of course, if the original Slate piece simply ended after the four quotes, and then the article was updated based on the eyewitness’s account, that would explain why the original story seemed newsworthy (Bush is coming undone) but the revised version is not really newsworthy (some transcriber erred) and the second half is inconsistent with the suggestion in the first. But wouldn’t it have been nice to make clear (if this is indeed what happened) that the second half was an update to the first, rather than a single story, and perhaps also explicitly take back at the outset the “malfunctioning Stepford Wife” item? Or am I being too picky here?