It seems that Fox News Channel's White House Correspondent, Major Garrett, was shopping around for some extracurricular entertainment while President Obama is in Las Vegas next month.
According to the blog Gawker.com, Major Garrett tweeted a link to a Las Vegas call-girl service during last night's State of the Union address.
According to today's blog post:
In the run-up to the State of the Union address, Garrett offered Twitter followers a link to SOTU excerpts, but the condensed URL sent them to ForWant.com's classified ads for erotic services in Las Vegas, instead.
Garrett, of course, blames the technology:
I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention.
For those of you not familiar with Twitter, or not familiar with how URL-shortening services work, here's a quick overview.
- Twitter allows only 140 characters per post. In order to conserve space and save characters, many Twitter clients will automatically shorten your URLs using one of several popular services like bit.ly or TinyURL.com...so it'll take a site like www.omigodlookatthestuffmycatdoes.com/blog/post/pics/funnystuff/pooping/132498213/ and shorten it to something like http://bit.ly/... (not an actual bit.ly link, just a dramatization.)
- Basically, what these services do is look in their database, and if a website is already represented by an existing short URL, they'll return that to you to use. If not, they generate a new one and give you that.
- When a user clicks the shortened link, bit.ly or TinyURL.com provide a redirect command to your browser that gives it the long URL and tells it where to go to find the original item.
One important thing to note is that bit.ly does not provide a mechanism to change links that are already in the database. So, for example, a prankster couldn't go in and redirect all your links to, say, a gathering site for "companionship."
So, the bit.ly link in Major Garrett's first post was automatically shortened based on something that he pasted in at the website.
Gawker again:
It all sounds like a terrible coincidence. But sometimes lighting does strike twice. In addition to Garrett's inadvertent interest in Vegas entertainment, Garrett recently used Twitter to break the news that Obama will visit Las Vegas in February to stump for Harry Reid.
Asked for comment, Fox News boss Roger Ailes said, "Meh. Next time he's on TV we'll just put a (D) by his name and this will all blow over."
(OK, that last part was snark...but do you think I'm really that far off?)
All snark aside, I don't care what you do with your free time. If you want to pay somebody for whatever, go ahead. But when you work for the sanctimonious assholes at Fox News, don't expect any whiff of an ethical transgression not to draw fire.
As for Major Garrett, this was his response to the Twitterverse:
For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that's not good enuf, take a hike.