In a blogospheric freak-out this morning, Danny Glover of the National Journal's "Beltway Blogroll" -- and more to the point in this case, of the NJ's "Technology Daily" -- takes aim at new John Edwards hire Amanda Marcotte, of Pandagon, as the campaign's blogger.
What's his beef?
The scandalous storyline: Like all bloggers, Marcotte is fast and loose with her opinions, and her opinion of the infamous rape allegations against lacrosse players at Duke University didn't sit well with some folks. When Marcotte started catching flak for that opinion, she apparently deleted it and started altering other comments at Pandagon.
[...]
But now Marcotte's attempts to airbrush her past are fast becoming a black-eye for Edwards, even as he earned raves yesterday for a speech at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Washington. "Edwards should demand Marcotte’s immediate resignation from the campaign," wrote K.C. Johnson of Durham-In-Wonderland, who blogs about the Duke case and acknowledged being a supporter of Barack Obama, an Edwards presidential rival.
But note what Ezra Klein points out:
Had he asked her -- or, say, another former Pandagon writer, like me -- he'd have been told that Pandagon has endured various server and archive problems over the years, which have led to a fair amount of irrevocable archive deletion. This would have been easy enough to check even without calling Amanda: Just surf forward a day from the absent post and see if its successors are also missing. Or just look at the archives for that month: Everything after October 8th, 2005, is missing. So is everything, incidentally, from my years on the site: A much-missed casualty of server crashes and then a Wordpress overwrite.
Glover is insinuating that Amanda deleted the final post of Pandagon's founder in order to, well, it's not really clear, but to do something nefarious. Then Glover decided he wouldn't actually ask her because he didn't expect a response. To make matters worse, he also refrained from looking into the archives to see if there was any pattern or alternative explanation. And he gets paid a salary by an established media outlet to report and intelligently analyze the political blogging scene. As I said: Pretty nifty. Slackers everywhere salute you, Mr. Glover. Your misinformed readership and your bosses, however, may prove somewhat less enthusiastic.
Uh-oh! Headline: Technology Daily Reporter Fails to Report, Flubs on Technology
Glover has since apologized in an update:
It sounds like the missing post and others from the fall of 2005 were just the result of technology problems at Pandagon.
I also should have contacted Marcotte rather than assuming, based on her comment about her critics, that she wouldn't respond to a query from me.
But it looks to me like "The First Second Blog Scandal of Campaign 2008" is "fast becoming a black-eye for Edwards" the National Journal.
I note the detachment with which Glover mentions that:
"Some commeters in a forum at TalkLeft called Marcotte a "political liability" to Edwards, and one said that "if she feels this man should be our next president, it might be wise [to] make herself politically correct immediately or resign from the position."
Good thing he didn't do the deed himself, eh?
If he had, why, he'd be wise to make himself technologically correct immediately or resign from the position.
Whew! Close one!
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