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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 2/8/2007 10:21:14 AM
Title: "Dubious content"
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From GREGORY GILLAM: Time's story Bloggers on the Bus about a controversy over bloggers hired by John Edward's campaign presents a rather negative picture of the candidate and blogs involved. Yet it contains questionable content which would get a blogger mocked.

The article says this: "McCain's campaign was excoriated for using one
as a propagandist when conservative blogger Patrick Hynes admitted last summer he was surreptitiously paid by the candidate...In 2005, John Thune, the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Dakota, paid bloggers to attack supporters of his opponent, then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle."

Thune is a Republican, the campaign was in 2004 and Democrat Tom Daschle obviously wasn't majority leader at the time. This is not a typo, these are basic, obvious facts which take a few seconds to check on google.

Either Massimo Calabresi is remarkably incompetent or there's bias - perhaps political, perhaps a blind need to balance the McCain example by citing a Democrat. Either way the correct version has two examples of Republicans using bloggers in sneaky ways and two of Democrats hiring them openly. That one of less flattering Republican examples was given to a Democrat in an article largely negative towards Democrats at least gives the appearance of bias, as it is linked to an article labeling Edwards the next Dean (as in loose cannon).

Then there's this falsehood: "After right-wing bloggers began targeting
her, Marcotte announced that she had deleted her most controversial Duke comments."

This is at best a distortion. Marcotte did not make this claim - it was spread by hard right blogger Michelle Malkin, who later retracted it. There's a slight chance the Edwards campaign stumbled in response, but it's hard to verify. Why is Calabresi repeating a talking point spread by Malkin?

If Calabresi was a blogger, he would make corrections, clarifications and
discuss the appearance of bias in a post on his blog with the same level of visibility as his original post. I wonder if we'll see any acknowledgment by Time of the dubious content at all. [Permalink]

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