It never ceases to amaze me that while bloggers are often criticized by many journalists for not fact-checking their stories, stories about bloggers are regularly littered with glaring factual errors. They might take a lesson from our book, and back up their assertions with a standard citation method, such as hyperlinks. Take, for example,
the new piece in Time magazine about Amanda Marcotte. While, unlike every other establishment piece on this story today, this article does at least mention that John McCain's blogger, Patrick Hynes has been the center of controversy, check out how many things they got wrong:
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.
What? Since when is Thune a Democrat? I also wasn't aware that the campaign took place in 2005, or that Daschle was majority leader at the time.
After right-wing bloggers began targeting her, Marcotte announced that she had deleted her most controversial Duke comments. The deletion garnered critics on both the left and right who said she was pandering to Edwards, a former Senator from North Carolina, where Duke is located and where he has based his campaign. The Edwards campaign and its supporters made matters worse by claiming that a technical glitch, not Marcotte, had brought the controversial posts down.
Actually,
it was hate-speech purveyor Michelle Malkin who falsely claimed Marcotte had deleted the comments. She later issued a difficult-to-find retraction, when it was proven those claims were false:
Guess what? It's not the only completely off-the-wall, profanity-choked post she's trying to hide.* Updated/correction below(...)
***Updated/Correction. Looks like Marcotte's Katrina post is actually still available to the public here under a different URL. My bad.
I wonder if Time's correction, if it comes, will be similarly difficult to find.
Edwards almost always wins the nonscientific but closely watched daily straw poll organized by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas.
Daily straw poll?
The polls only take place once a month. Maybe the author was confused by the name "Dailykos."
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Of course, as I said above, despite all of these errors, the article could have been a lot worse (it could have been, say, every other article from an established news outlet written about this story today). Then again, this is Time magazine, which through its hiring of Anna Marie Cox and Joe Klein (especially Joe Klein) has shown that it doesn't exactly have the same problem with us foul-mouthed bloggers as other establishment news outlets. Now, if only an establishment news organization could write an article on blogging that is both factually accurate and not filled with obvious loathing toward progressive bloggers, then maybe we will finally be getting somewhere.
Update: You can point out these errors to the story's author, Massimo Calabresi, by sending an email to massimo_calabresi@timemagazine.com.
