Shots In The Dark: Bad, Biased Journalism

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Bad, Biased Journalism

The Lieberman campaign is still claiming that Lamont supporters have "crippled" its web site--and the New York TImes is playing along, posting a story to that effect about 15 minutes ago. (You can find it here:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/nyregion/08cnd-campaign.html?hp&ex=1155096000&en=6e7fe1fab055b2ed&ei=5094&partner=homepage).

Too bad DailyKos has already figured out that the reason the Lieberman site is down is because the campaign is only paying $15 a month for hosting capabilities, and it can't handle the traffic it's been getting. (Daily Kos, by comparison, pays $7,000 a month.)

(I"m away from the office and can't hyperlink; the DailyKos thing is here: http://www.dailykos.com/.)

Writes Kos: "They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients."

The Times doesn't mention this. Patrick Healy, the reporter covering Lieberman, is usually very good. This is not his finest hour.

Oh, and by the way--Lieberman's losing.

¶ 4:05 PM

Comments:

Richard, this is a classic clash of blogger standards versus MSM standards. Earlier today, Kos and others were certain that the Lieberman campaign had failed to pay its bills. That turned out to be wrong. Then Kos, you, and others were certain that the Lieberman campaign was paying $15/mo. The campaign says that is also wrong. Another Kos "scoop" had 2Dog Media as the company behind Lieberman's website. That turned out to be wrong as of three months ago (as reported by Wonkette).

So the Times was only being its regular-old fact-based self by saying "it was not clear who was at fault." At no point in the day did the Times ever say that Lamont supporters had done it; the paper just reported that the Lieberman camp had made those accusations. Amid all the misinformation today, I'm glad the Times stayed above it -- and avoided all the mistakes made by Kos and others.

And if I know my Times well, I'm sure there'll be as good an explanation as any in tomorrow's paper and a thorough investigation sometime soon.

# posted by Regular Reader : 10:28 PM

Sorry, but I have to disagree with you. Daily Kos may have been wrong, but the Times coverage of this was abysmal. It played the story prominently, which was only of value to the Lieberman camp...but for much of the day it had no comments from bloggers, no comments from a web-hosting firm, no context at all. The Times gave big play to a story that it couldn't possibly report out, and that helped Lieberman. If you look at the final piece, by Michael Cooper and John Markoff, it's much more level-headed than what was on the top left of the Times website for much of the afternoon.

The difference between blogger standards and MSM standards here, I think, is that bloggers freely recognize that we are often wrong, hasty, imperfect...but we don't put our material out there with the NYT imprimatur. The reporting of this incident did not meet the high standards of the NYT.

# posted by richard : 1:14 AM

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