At yesterday's White House press briefing, Major Garrett of Fox News embarrassed himself by demonstrating his utter lack of understanding of the Internet and email. Today he is escalating his campaign to make a total ass of himself, and he is doing a magnificent job of it.
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Garrett appeared on Fox News today to announce that he is pursuing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to find out how emails, allegedly sent from the White House, were received by people who never requested them. He has even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of this raging controversy. There are some rather simple and entirely innocent answers to this mystery, but Garrett can't be bothered to investigate them. On his blog today he admitted to journalistic negligence that would make a cub reporter cringe.
"...in every instance so far, e-mailers insist the e-mail(s) they received from the White House was/were not forwarded. They are positive the e-mails arrived directly from the White House."
"Fox cannot independently verify all of these accounts. Fox can only represent what hundreds of e-mailers have represented to me or to the network."
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So Garret is relying on the accounts of the people who contacted him who said they were "positive" the emails came directly from the White House, but he can't verify a single one. He is satisfied that these people whom he has never met, never questioned, never vetted, are so reliable that he is under no obligation to confirm their assertions.
Garrett produces two examples of aggrieved email recipients, one of whom complains, not of an email, but a pop-up ad containing an email from the White House. Of course, a pop-up ad cannot contain an email. It can contain ad, but Garrett didn't even verify that and, frankly, I'm skeptical. These are the people on whose "positive" assertions he was relying when filing his FOIA request. But Garrett is missing an even bigger piece of this puzzle.
Apparently he never bothered to look at his very own Fox News blog on which there is a "SHARE" feature that permits anyone to send an email from that site to any other email address. And - surprise - WhiteHouse.gov has the very same feature.
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I don't know if Garrett is really this clueless about the Internet or if he is deliberately manufacturing a remarkably lame scandal. But before he gets himself in too deep, he may want to get former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens to explain this series of tubes to him.
For a party that had no problem with the Bush administration actually monitoring and reading their emails, they are sure making a big stink out of something as innocent as a contact list from which they can unsubscribe with a click.
News Alert (8/15/09): Garrett may NOT be the stupidest person on Fox News. Jamie Colby, the Saturday morning anchor of America's News HQ, just reported on the scuffle between Garrett and Gibbs. In doing so she announced that she had received the Axelrod email. She then wondered aloud, on the air, if forwarding that email to someone else would wind up placing her on a White House list. The reporter to whom she was speaking (didn't get her name) agreed that this was a possibility. Congratulations Jamie. You have now taken the lead. Major...you're gonna have to step up your game.