The Hill reports:

Obama considered attending the Herzliya Conference, a highly regarded national security and policy gathering outside Tel Aviv. This year’s conference began Sunday, and a spokesman for the event said that Obama was invited to attend but did not accept the offer.

“He was invited; the president was invited. All of the top people in the U.S. were invited,” the spokesman said. “But it’s not as if his attendance was imminent or expected.”

A Obama aide declined to comment on the development.

Let’s see, the president was invited. He never accepted the invitation. He wasn’t really expected to show up and the Hill didn’t even get a comment from within the Obama circle. Yet it ran with this misleading title.

Full disclosure: I changed things around a little bit…well not much but just the name. This is what the Hill actually reported:

Palin scraps plan for early 2011 Israel visit

Media reports in December indicated that Palin had opened discussions about a foreign trip in 2011, with Israel and Great Britain at the top of the list of potential destinations. Details of the overseas venture, including the dates and locations, however, were never finalized.

Palin considered attending the Herzliya Conference, a highly regarded national security and policy gathering outside Tel Aviv. This year’s conference began Sunday, and a spokesman for the event said that Palin was invited to attend but did not accept the offer.

“She was invited; the president was invited. All of the top people in the U.S. were invited,” the spokesman said. “But it’s not as if her attendance was imminent or expected.”

A Palin aide declined to comment on the development.

First, the Hill runs with an assumption that Governor Palin has opened discussions to travel to Israel. Those assumptions are based on “media reports” from Shushannah Walshe of the Daily Beast. When the report was first published in December, Palin aide Rebecca Mansour tweeted the following:

@shushwalshe how do you claim “exclusive” knowledge of anything when you’ve got nothing but conjecture? You call this journalism?

To make its claim more legitimate, the Hill links to two articles: the aforementioned piece by Walshe and a story in Politico, which based its report on the same Daily Beast article.

So what do we have here? The Hill runs with a thinly-sourced article while noting that no dates or locations had ever been finalized. It reports that Governor Palin received an invitation to attend an event that the President and other top officials had also been invited to – one that neither of them accepted or were expected to attend. To wrap it up, the Hill notes that it has no comment from the Palin camp. Yet, it runs with a story and a completely misleading headline.

For good measure, the Hill goes on to trash the Governor further for no good reason.  This is the typical Palin-bashing stories the LSM runs that is title first, contents later.

And the media wonders why Governor Palin believes it is becoming more and more irrelevant.

UPDATE: The Hill has now changed the headline to: Palin turns down Israel conference invite but they sneaked in this little nugget:

HERZLIYA, Israel — Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has canceled tentative plans to visit Israel early this year, The Hill has learned.

So has Governor Palin turned it down or did she cancel? Turned down means she was invited to attend but didn’t accept. Cancelled means she accepted then changed her mind. Did Obama cancel too?

Lamestream media at it’s best!