Another Paper-Thin Attack on Power Line
This is actually pretty funny. For the fifth time in less than a year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
launches an attack against Power Line. Needless to say, for the fifth time, the paper screwed up.
This time the article is written by a student who attended a guest lecture by Power Line blogger John Hinderaker. Camille Gage wrote:
Prior to Hinderaker's presentation, the week before the November elections, I visited the Powerline site. To my surprise an Oct. 27 post covered alleged voter fraud in Racine, Wis., my hometown. The charges involved the registering of illegal aliens to vote. The story seemed outrageous, so I made a few phone calls to check it out.
What I discovered was troubling. There was no factual basis for the voter fraud allegations. Powerline posted the story based on the word of a single individual employed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). This was hearsay at best, posted as "news" at a time when voter registration efforts by the Democrats and 527 groups were coming under fire by conservatives.
Here's the original
Power Line post. Now this may be a little hard for Camilla Gauge (misspelling intentional) to understand, but I'm sure my readers will know why the words, "
sent two individuals from other states to Racine" appear in a different color than the rest of the text. That's right, it's a permalink! So when you click on it, you come to a story that appeared at Agape Press, a Christian news service.
In other words Power Line (try to spell their blog name correctly, Cammille!) did not "post the story based on the word of a single individual...." etc. They posted the story based on the fact that the story had already appeared at Agape Press.
And horrifically for the Star Tribune, it appears that Camilia did not do a very good job of fact-checking herself with her "few phone calls to check it out". There was no factual basis for the voter fraud allegations? Tell it to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which had
this article just a week ago:
In Racine, two Milwaukee men are awaiting trial on election fraud cases tied to voter registration drives, in which authorities say fraudulent cards were submitted to election officials there last fall.
Here's a
brief article from a Racine paper:
Two Milwaukee men, including one who ran for the State Assembly, await trial on charges of election fraud in Racine County.
Damien Donnelle Jones, 24, and Robert Marquis Blakely, 24, are accused of registering voters they never talked to. The two men were working for Project Vote, and were assigned to Racine to register people to vote in the Nov. 2 election. They are accused of multiple counts of election fraud and misconduct in office; Blakely is also charged with forgery.
Power Line says that in a phone call with the Star Tribune's commentary editor, it was indicated that the paper did no fact checking on Ms. Cage's piece accusing Power Line of not fact checking. Which is ironic as Camille J. Gage reminds us:
And therein lies the cautionary Catch-22: Bloggers may serve as media watchdogs, but who will watch the blogs? Do you have time to fact-check what you read online?
I got a hunch that the Power Line guys will be getting a pretty profuse apology from the paper pretty soon.
(Note: The misspellings are intentional; it's a blogger trick to misspell a name, because that way if somebody types "Camilla Gage" instead of "Camille Gage", Google will send them to your blog.)
Queen La Shawn Barber
has more.
