How Fox News bumbled the Sestak/Romanoff stories

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked his panel whether it's fair that “the new narrative in Washington is that the vaunted Obama team is a bunch of bumblers.” In response, Mara Liasson managed to convict the administration of bumbling their response to the controversy over job discussions with Senate candidates Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff -- even after she acknowledged the White House didn't do anything wrong in the first place.

Liasson said the White House erred because it supposedly waited “a very long time” to explain what happened, and now the Justice Department will have to investigate because of the White House's purported “cover up” and “stonewall.” In the middle of all this, Liasson noted she hadn't talked to “any expert who thinks something criminal or unethical occurred.”

Get that? Liasson says the administration didn't do anything wrong, but it's still all their fault that the job discussions became such a big deal because they waited “a very long time, an inexplicably long time” to respond.

Actually, the administration probably wouldn't have had to respond to any of this if news organizations like Fox News hadn't helped drum up a fake controversy. This became controversial -- even though it's not -- because Fox News repeatedly and baselessly threw around words like "impeachable offense," and "felony" and "crime," and "illegal" and "bribe" to describe what happened. And that drumbeat has continued even after the White House's response, strongly suggesting that Fox would have pushed this story no matter when that response had come.

Translation: Fox News bumbled the story.