In a March 22 Slate.com article, editor Jacob Weisberg questioned whether serial killers and presidential candidates are “really so easy to tell apart,” and compared the backgrounds of various serial killers with those of several 2008 presidential candidates, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) and Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL), John McCain (R-AZ), and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY). However, on the Slate.com homepage and washingtonpost.com, the article was teased as “Why Obama Is Like a Serial Killer” -- complete with a picture of Obama -- even though he was just one of several candidates highlighted by Weisberg.

Additionally, Weisberg repeated in his article the false claim that former vice president “Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet.” This falsehood -- which originated during the 2000 presidential campaign and has endured since -- was a distortion of Gore's 1999 claim that while serving in Congress, he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

As Media Matters for America documented, Slate.com previously teased a December 14, 2006, article on a land deal between Obama and Chicago Democratic fundraiser Antoin Rezko as “Inside Obama's Shady Real Estate Deal,” despite the fact that the article explained there is “no evidence” that Obama did anything wrong.

Weisberg's article, titled “Candidates and Killers,” cited several current and former presidential candidates in addition to Obama:

Questioned about David Garvin, who shot three people to death in Greenwich Village last week, one former co-worker offered the classical description of him as ''quiet and unassuming." True to form, the Phoenix neighbors of Mark Goudeau, a violent ex-con charged with crimes linked to the “Baseline Killer,” described him as “a sweet, sweet guy” and a “hard worker.” Michael Devlin, accused of kidnapping and imprisoning two young boys in the St. Louis suburbs, was predictably “quiet” and “nice,” even "a big friendly marshmallow."

By contrast, profilers digging into Barack Obama's early days find signs of future triumph everywhere. Obama's half-sister was recently quoted in the New York Times saying, ''There was always a joke between my mom and Barack that he would be the first black president." Obama's third-grade teacher in Indonesia recalls him writing an essay for school titled, “I want to be a president” (whether in Washington or Jakarta, she did not specify). Such early impressions hardly make Obama unique. “If there was ever going to be a woman president, we thought Hillary would be at the top of the list,” said a college classmate of Mrs. Clinton's. One of Giuliani's childhood friends from Massapequa recalled for Newsday, “We'd joke about it, 'Oh there's Rudolph William Louis Giuliani 3d, the first Italian-Catholic President of the United States.' ”A fellow POW said that John McCain revealed his presidential ambitions in 1970 at the Hanoi Hilton. Al Gore regularly signaled his presidential plans from the crib.

Yet this is how the article was teased on Slate.com:

Similarly, on washingtonpost.com:

Weisberg also wrote:

But are spree killers and candidates really so easy to tell apart? An obsession with publicity and getting even are only the most obvious thing Rudy Giuliani and Son of Sam have in common. Newt Gingrich and Washington sniper John Allen Muhammed [sic] are both charismatic leaders, quick to anger, and a bit paranoid. John Kerry and the Unabomber are both loners -- though with different-sized cabins out West. And of course, both politician and killer tend to be credit hogs. Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet; the Zodiac killer, subject of a new movie, took credit for murders he probably didn't even commit.

Gore, however, never claimed to have “invented the Internet.” Rather, on the March 9, 1999, edition of CNN's Late Edition, Gore said:

GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.