Possibly the dumbest story ever

ABC wrote the story. The good folks at TNR spotted it, and explain the problem:

I've seen a lot of dumb news reports in my life, but I'm not sure anything can quite match this one from ABC News. The premise of the report is this: Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on people who make more than $250,000, so the reporter has gone and found people who earn a little more than that sum who plan to decrease their income so that they come in underneath the magic line.

Now, the obvious objection here is that the tax code doesn't work that way. A tax increase affects the marginal dollar that a person gains. That's means only every dollar over $250,000 is taxed at a higher rate. Obama is not proposing a tax system whereby somebody who goes from $249,999 to $250,000 suddenly becomes poorer. Nobody has ever enacted a tax hike like that in the history of the United States.

Look, it's fair for someone not to know how the tax system works. For the longest time, I honestly didn't know how it works (still don't get a lot of it). But reporters usually have editors. And in this story, you also had sources explaining how it actually works. You'd think the reporter would have said "uh oh" and canned the story.

In fact, ABC has now changed the story and made it acceptable. The story now points out that the sources have it all wrong. But that's not what the story said yesterday. And ABC's explanation of the edit is, while kind to the reporter in question, less than honest:

Editor's Note: Yesterday ABC News published a version of this story which some readers felt did not provide a comprehensive enough analysis of Obama's tax code for those families making $250k or more. ABCNews.com has heard those concerns and after review has decided to post an updated version of the story below.

It wasn't "some readers" who thought the story had a problem, ABC's own editors obviously agreed, and edited the story. Second, the concern wasn't that the story didn't provide a comprehensive enough analysis. The concern was that the story entirely misrepresented Obama's tax plan. And the editor's edit proves that those concerns were correct, and shared by the editors.