Time online article mangled facts about campaign bloggers

In a February 7 Time.com article by Massimo Calabresi on the controversy surrounding two bloggers hired by the presidential campaign of former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), Time.com reported that Patrick Hynes, a conservative blogger working for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), "bounced back" from an earlier controversy in which he failed to disclose his relationship to the McCain campaign. However, Time.com's claim that Hynes "bounced back" gave the false impression that the media gave significant coverage to Hynes' earlier controversy. The article was also rife with basic factual errors -- including, claiming that, in "2005, John Thune" was "the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Dakota" and that he ran against "then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle." The year was 2004 and, during that time, the Democrats, whom Daschle led in the Senate, were in the minority; Thune was -- and is -- a Republican.

Time.com has since posted a correction to the article, noting that the "original version of this story incorrectly stated that Senatorial candidate John Thune of South Dakota was a Democrat" and that "Thune was and is a Republican Senator." The correction does not address the article's incorrect claims that Thune ran against Daschle in 2005, and that Daschle was the Senate majority leader when he lost.

As Media Matters for America documented, on February 7, The New York Times and the Associated Press reported criticism by Catholic League president Bill Donohue that the Edwards campaign bloggers -- Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister -- are "anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," without noting Donohue's own history of vulgar, trash-talking bigotry -- or of his decision to dismiss anti-Catholic bigotry on the part of Jerome Corsi, a key anti-Kerry operative in 2004. Media Matters has also noted that the media largely ignored the controversy behind McCain's hiring of Hynes, who failed to disclose his employment with McCain's campaign even though he posted several weblog entries praising McCain as a presidential candidate and attacking McCain's rivals. However, the February 7 Time.com article stated that Hynes "bounced back" from the controversy, even though the controversy itself drew extremely little national media attention, and no attention from Time magazine or its website.

In addition, as Media Matters further noted, in 2004, posting on the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, Hynes called Chelsea Clinton "hideously ugly" -- echoing a joke McCain had reportedly told about Chelsea Clinton years earlier. Blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald, pointing to other "controversial" comments by Hynes, argued that bloggers working for any campaign should be held to the same standard the media have held Marcotte and McEwan.

From the Time.com article:

Edwards is not the first candidate to discover the potential pitfalls of putting bloggers to use. 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 while he was writing critical posts about McCain's Republican rival [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney (Hynes is now officially and publicly on the McCain payroll). 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. Clinton's big blog hire for this campaign, the well-known Peter Daou, has caused a kerfuffle of his own by buying advertisements on blogs around the country, including conservative sites, drawing criticism from liberal pundits and from bloggers whose sites were left out of the ad buy.

Daou and Hynes have bounced back, but Marcotte may not be so lucky. If Edwards has got cold feet, Marcotte could be out of a job. Even if she survives, though, her supporters have made it clear that they have their own agenda. When she announced that she was moving to the Edwards campaign, hundreds of supporters wrote in to Pandagon to congratulate her. Buried in the pile of warm wishes, however, was a warning of sorts: "Congratulations," wrote a user named MAJeff, "and best of luck. Well, best of luck until we've decided you and your candidate are not pure enough for us and we all turn on you."