Bloggasm

Les Otten is no stranger to plagiarism charges. Not long after the former American Skiing Company CEO entered the race for Maine governor last summer, his campaign was accused of ripping off Obama’s iconic “O” logo and website, a situation only made worse when he responded with the untrue claim that Obama had borrowed his own logo from a Pepsi campaign (the Pepsi logo, in fact, came after Obama’s). But the allegations that Matt Gagnon began launching this past Friday were much more serious. Gagnon, a former colleague of mine, runs the Maine-centric blog, Pine Tree Politics, and last week he was reading the written answers from the gubernatorial candidates to a questionnaire sent out by a fellow blogger. The blog, Augusta Insider, had posted the responses to his questions (which were mostly focused on education issues) last Tuesday, and there was something about Otten’s answer that Gagnon found familiar.

“We both did a little digging on our own here and linked it to testimony given by Stephen Bowen from [the Maine Heritage Policy Center],” he told me in a phone interview. “It was public testimony he had given to the State House.”

That testimony had been copied nearly word-for-word (with some bullet points thrown in to mask the plagiarism) and sent off to the Augusta Insider, presented as Otten’s own original response. Gagnon published his initial post exposing the similarities on Friday, a piece he said was quickly circulated among Republicans. But despite widespread online distribution, the traditional press outlets didn’t immediately touch the story. The blogger would go on to write several more posts exposing much more extensive plagiarism before reporters would finally begin catching up on Sunday.

“I ended up doing more digging and found his ‘Jobs for Maine’ plan, which is one of his central points of his campaign,” he said. “It’s prominently featured on his website, it’s like a pop-up feature. I went in there and looked at a bunch of passages and started literally doing a Google search of paragraphs. Take one paragraph, throw it into Google and spit it out, and I ended up finding additional instances of direct copies of more Heritage Foundation stuff in his jobs section. So we’re going down the list and we’re finding more and more instances of him copying directly from this one policy think tank on multiple occasions and we continued to break these stories as they go on.”

Eventually, Otten’s campaign responded with a press release in which he claimed that he had met with the Heritage Foundation folks and had simply forgotten to include the citations, essentially implying that he had received the think tank’s permission to copy and paste its work. This prompted a quick response from Heritage’s Stephen Bowen (whose work had been copied without attribution) accusing the campaign of plagiarism and casting doubt on the claims in the press release. This action, Magnon predicted, is what caused the mainstream press to get engaged in the story, and it quickly began trying to catch up.

“We started seeing stuff from the Press Herald, from Maine public broadcasting, we saw stuff from Bangor Daily News,” he said. “The snowball started to build up at that point and then this morning the Bangor Daily News wrote a pretty big article on the whole thing that had a lot of details and essentially prompted the campaign to say, ‘OK, this is getting to be such a big story that someone has to go,’ so they ended up firing a staffer who they say was responsible for this.’”

That staffer, Will Gardiner, was a consultant who worked for a firm owned by Otten’s own campaign manager. The campaign provided the standard plagiarism defense that notes had been copied to the website and the attribution had been lost in the shuffle, but Gardiner nonetheless had to go because he had become a “distraction” to the campaign.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first major campaign story that Gagnon has broken. Just a week before he had contributed to the reporting on a campaign scandal from a Democratic candidate for governor, one that led to his exit from the race. Given the lament of editors everywhere that the lay-offs at newspapers would lead to the demise of government watch-dogs, I asked if these anecdotal instances showed that bloggers at least have the ability to replace some mainstream reporters. After all, Gagnon doesn’t even live in the state of Maine (though Pine Tree Politics is a Maine-centric blog, he lives several hundred miles away in the DC area).

“I hate the word ‘replace’ because what I do and what other blogs do is often times very similar but in a lot of ways not similar,” he replied. “I mean it has a lot of the same functions in breaking news like this, but it’s not really what I’m for. I prefer not to break news, I’d rather digest it and analyze it. But nonetheless you make a good point that at this point since the mainstream media is being so lax and the reporters they do have are essentially note takers, not doing the investigative journalism that they used to, it’s basically falling onto the people who are volunteering, who want to do this, who have an interest and are willing to volunteer their time and energy.”

I found it curious that he said he didn’t enjoy breaking news. Isn’t that what drives the most exposure and traffic?

“I’m a volunteer from 800 miles away, and to break news takes a lot of effort,” he said. “I’ve been on the phone a hell of a lot in the past two weeks. Personally, just for my own pace I enjoy finding the news that’s been happening and doing the analysis and finding the story about why it’s important and what to expect, my own opinion on my own steam on my own time. But if I’m chasing breaking stories I’m going to be devoting a lot of time to it that I don’t necessarily want to spend.”

Of course, Gagnon wouldn’t be able to pass on a good story if it were to fall in his lap. And the next time this happens, perhaps mainstream reporters will think twice before dismissing the story before it gets too large for even their news editors to ignore. Otherwise they’ll find themselves playing yet another game of catch-up.

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It was the shot heard round the blogosphere. After nearly a week of speculation on whether Gizmodo had purchased a “stolen” next-gen iPhone, one it then flaunted to the tune of millions of pageviews, police raided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home on Friday, confiscating four computers, two servers, and other items as part of an investigation presumably into whether the iPhone had been obtained illegally. Unsurprisingly, the Gizmodo post announcing this search has already received more than a half million views, not just because this involves a highly-publicized Apple story but also because this may be one of the most high-profile cases in which the law must determine whether a blogger should legally be considered a journalist. As I found after conducting several interviews, editors from other major online news outlets are watching the case with extreme interest.

According to a letter written by Gawker Media’s Chief Operating Officer Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker believes that Chen should be protected by both state and national journalism shield laws. “Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company,” Darbyshire wrote. “Abundant examples of his work are available on the web. He works from home, which is his de facto newsroom, and all equipment used by him there is used for the purposes of his employment with us.”

Immediately upon reading this I began contacting editors from well-known online news networks, many of whom employ bloggers. It didn’t surprise me at all that most of them agreed that Chen should be legally considered a journalist, but some were more cautious when opining on whether the journalism shield laws should apply in this case. After all, Gizmodo didn’t just interview an anonymous source, it purchased an iPhone that many considered to be stolen, making a few of my sources wonder if it had crossed a delicate line between journalism and theft.

John Biggs, editor-in-chief of the TechCrunch-owned CrunchGear, was one of those who took this measured approach. He suggested in my phone interview with him that it may have been better for Gizmodo to pay for temporary “access” to the iPhone rather purchasing it outright. “That definitely sounds like the way it should have been done,” Biggs said. “You can’t second guess everything but it’s basically similar to the Pentagon Papers in one respect in the sense that you have a document that was given to you, not purchased obviously, but you had access to a document, and that would obviously be more accepted than outright saying, ‘here we gave this person $5,000 and purchased this phone … purchased this stolen item that wasn’t anyone’s to begin with.”

The CrunchGear editor said that he has been approached with gadget prototypes in the past, a situation that obviously presents a tricky ethical dilemma. In a TechCrunch post, Briggs’ boss, Michael Arrington, compared the iPhone leak to his own experience dealing with hacked Twitter documents, noting that he hadn’t solicited the information or paid for it. “Where Gizmodo made a mistake in my opinion is when they purchased the phone,” Arrington wrote. “This is something we would never do. We’ve been asked if we wanted to purchase information in the past that would have made for some great stories and we have always declined.”

Ed Morrissey, an editor for one of the most popular conservative blogs, Hot Air, said that even if the iPhone was considered stolen in some vague legal sense, it shouldn’t have resulted in a Gizmodo editor’s home being raided. “It seems to me that seizing six computers because of the supposed theft, the alleged theft, of a single iPhone is somewhat overkill,” he told me. “Even apart from the shield law.”

But should Chen be considered a journalist? Yes, Morrissey said, noting that Gawker blogs regularly break stories and conduct original reporting. But though he argued that journalism shield laws should apply to most leaks, he also said there should be some exceptions when it comes to national security. “Certainly there has to be parameters on everybody, not just on bloggers, but on mainstream news journalists about what they can and can’t use that shield for, but it seems to me just based on what I’ve seen that this is a very strange overreaction on the part of California.”

I asked Morrissey if this could determine whether anonymous sources would continue to feel comfortable leaking stories to bloggers if it’s determined that the online journalists aren’t shielded by such laws. He agreed with this notion, recounting a story that he broke that involved a scandal in Canada. “Fortunately I wasn’t in Canadian jurisdiction at the time, but part of the reason that person came to me is because that person was pretty sure I’d protect his or her identity and I was out of the reach of the Canadian authorities,” he explained.

Mediaite editor Colby Hall opined in a phone interview that Chen should be protected. “I believe currently that they should be protected by journalism laws,” he said. “The larger question is what is journalism, and the definition of journalism has evolved … Gawker Media notoriously flaunts accepted practices of traditional journalism to great effect. I imagine at the end of the day not a lot will come of this.” Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon.com, expressed similar sentiments. “The fact that Gizmodo paid for the phone muddies the water a little, but would we really say that reporters/editors for TMZ and the National Enquirer — which also pay for information — aren’t protected?” she wrote in an email. “Gizmodo isn’t an Apple competitor; it paid $ for a big scoop in its realm of coverage. Salon doesn’t pay sources or pay for information or gadgets — but I have a hard time with the idea that Chen isn’t a journalist.” She later added in a follow-up email: ” Also, to storm Chen’s house, while he’s not there, rather than issue a subpoena? WTF? He didn’t have Osama bin Laden in there…”

But perhaps the most surprising response came from Tony Pierce, the blog editor for the LA Times. Pierce first gained his blogging street cred from his incredibly personal Busblog before landing a gig as editor for LAist. His success there led to his coveted spot at the Times. In a brief G-Chat message to me, he pointed to an interview Gawker founder Nick Denton gave to the Washington Post in which he said that, “We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention.”

Pierce’s conclusion?

“So unfortunately I think Gizmodo doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on if their own boss says they don’t really do journalism there.”

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When measuring a media outlet’s influence, the idea that the White House reads or listens to what you have to say would be a good indicator that your political sway reaches far beyond mere readership, but Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has the distinction of being one of the few who can write something that results in the Obama Administration actually dispatching operatives to push back against his posts. Early last week Greenwald posted the “case against Elena Kagan,” a long detailed piece arguing why the potential Supreme Court nominee would be a bad choice for the Court, partially because of her views on executive power and her lack of record. A few days later, the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported that “former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who is leading outreach efforts around the upcoming court vacancy, reached out to progressive allies to dismiss [Greenwald's] article written about Kagan.” Though he didn’t name who these progressive allies were, Greenwald noted in a follow-up post that there were three notable pieces — “this piece at Slate by former Clinton Solicitor General Walter Dellinger; this Huffington Post argument by legal analyst and author Linda Monk; and this cliché-filled, ad hominem, substance-free rant from Akin, Gump partner Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog” — that criticized his post on Kagan.

Though he noted in his post that he didn’t know whether any of these pieces were a direct result of White House outreach, it’s interesting to see a blogger who first began writing on a simple Blogspot account hold so much sway over an important decision, in this case who may be the next member of the Supreme Court. Given that one of Greenwald’s most constant criticisms of the traditional media is the insider’s access that the Beltway elite clamor for, sometimes at the expense of journalist integrity, I asked the Salon blogger if the knowledge that the White House is reading his work affects what he writes. “First of all, I don’t have the kind of access that can be taken away,” he replied. “I don’t rely upon or get invitations to speak before senior White House officials, and I don’t rely upon talking to people like that to do any work that I do. So the kind of conflicts I typically write about are the ones I avoid having. The kind of access in that regard isn’t anything I have, seek, or want.”

Greenwald noted that in the pushback against his piece, the Administration didn’t seem concerned so much with his attacks on Kagan’s views of executive power, but rather his points on her lack of experience. “I think that most progressives don’t care as much about executive power now that a progressive is in the White House now,” he said. “I think they’re more concerned with the ‘why take this risk?’ argument because she has no record. That I think is a powerful argument.”

I reached out to the three Kagan defenders who Greenwald had cited in his piece, but only one — Linda Monk, who wrote the Huffington Post piece — responded to my request for an interview. Monk is a constitutional scholar and is particularly notable (at least for this subject) because of an op-ed she penned for the Washington Post two decades ago concerning the Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court. Monk told me that she was not pressured by anyone in the White House to write her HuffPo piece (I asked Greenwald about this and he doesn’t doubt her, and neither do I), and she agreed with the idea that the Salon blogger has enormous influence in this debate. “[Greenwald]’s definitely a moral leader on this issue, but he also rallied the political opposition to the Bush torture policy,” she said in a phone interview. “I think future generations are going to look back at him and call him the hero of this entire episode.”

Monk said that while she agreed with most of the blogger’s points, there were a few she disagreed with, which is why she wrote her piece. “I think he’s tremendously influential in the sense of driving the debate. And we’re all having the debate about Elena Kagan, and I wouldn’t say we wouldn’t have it without him, but he’s certainly been a leader in it.”

I asked Monk to compare the blogosphere’s role in influencing the Supreme Court nominations to her own experience during the Bork episode, particularly since she had been able to bring her argument to the Washington Post back in 1987. “I didn’t have op ed access then, I was just getting started then,” she replied. “And I was just persistent; I was an unknown and this was a very rare case where someone who didn’t have a regular op ed in the Post got to publish there. With the blogosphere, that access to write op eds has diminished even more — it’s much harder to participate at the Washington Post, but with the Huffington Post it’s great, I can participate in real time, without having to wait to see if my piece will come out before the news cycle has changed … Glenn Greenwald, who’s in Brazil, reads my Huffington Post article and responds to it, and I can respond to him in real time, and then thousands if not millions of people all around the world who do care who’s being nominated can participate in real time.”

But even though Greenwald said he doesn’t allow his influential readership to taint what he writes, he does enjoy his influence. “I’ve built up over time a platform where I can have influence. If you’re writing on politics you want to have influence on something, you don’t want to be writing pointlessly, and so sure I’m aware that my blog is well read in Washington, in Congress, and to some extent in the White House. I’m aware of that and happy about it, but it never affects what I write. I just try hard to block out all those influences.”

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It’s become well established by now that news aggregators — blogs and social news sites that link to off-site content — have enormous influence. There have been countless articles about the power of Matt Drudge and how his links and headlines drive discussion. There are sites and studies that document which domains that Matt Drudge and social news site Digg link to most often.

But what about Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit? The site receives on average over half a million page views a day and can send so called “instalaunches,” surges of traffic that result in thousands of new readers via a single link. Many other bloggers and journalists read his site and it’s not uncommon for a linked item to receive wider coverage elsewhere. Though it’s widely known that Reynolds often links to conservative sites, he’s thought of by many to be much closer to the center than most right-wing bloggers (he would probably label himself a libertarian).

I originally set out to document which website domains Reynolds links to most often over a month-long period, but quickly discovered that his website only lets you click backward about three pages before it no longer offers the “previous entries” button. Instead, I had to settle for only four days of data, but even this relatively small data set was fascinating.

Over a period of four days spanning from February 23 to Feb. 26, Reynolds published a total of 287 links to 144 separate domains. In that small space of time, there were 26 domains that he linked to three times or more.

The two domains he linked to most often — Amazon.com (22) and Pajamasmedia.com (19) — aren’t surprising; Amazon has a referral system that allows Reynold to get a cut out of every click-through sale and Pajamas Media hosts his own blog. PJTV.com — also a Pajamas Media outlet — received a high number of links as well.

Of those domains that received three or more links, many of them were right-wing, but a few weren’t, including BoingBoing (9), Autoblog (3), New Scientist (3), Popsci.com (4), Popular Mechanics (4), Slate (3), and others. As is evident from the above list, though many Instapundit links are political in nature, he also often links to non-political stories — usually tech articles.

Below is a breakdown of all the domains Reynolds linked to three times or more:

Amazon.com — 22

weeklystandard.com — 3

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Chez Pazienza woke up one morning earlier this month and found an email from Andrew Breitbart — Matt Drudge protege, founder of Breitbart.com and other right-wing news sites — waiting for him in his inbox. He was immediately suspicious of its authenticity; the email was riddled with typos, devoid of capitalization, and apparently mailed at 3:30 in the morning.

“I went and checked the email address to see if it was him, because my first thought was, ‘why the hell would he bother with me?’” he told me in a recent phone interview.

The email responded to a post Pazienza had written on his blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, referencing a Salon article that had accused James O’Keefe, the ACORN-punking “pimp” that Breitbart has invested serious time and money in promoting, of being a racist. The Deus Ex Malcontent post wasn’t particularly critical of Breitbart or O’Keefe — it simply opined that whether O’Keefe was a racist was irrelevant because both sides of the political divide had already made up their minds — but that didn’t stop Breitbart from treating it as if it was.

“you’re insinuation that james is a racist is equally egregious,” Breitbart wrote. “does it ever dawn on you that we conservatives can’t fathom how lefties can’t see how horrible their social policies have turned out to be for poor and minorities.”

The 3:30 a.m. email bizarrely ended with a reference to the movie Footloose.

“It was weird, it caught me off guard,” Pazienza told me. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Breitbart would want with me.”

But this kind of Breitbart-launched offensive is nothing new or out-of-the-ordinary. While much attention has been given to the conservative’s attacks on traditional media outlets –through his Big Government site, interviews on MSNBC, and speeches at CPAC — he has been actively and aggressively going after bloggers and social media users who criticize him, a trend that has only intensified as more and more controversies surround James O’Keefe III in the wake of his arrest in Louisiana.

“There’s no question that when O’Keefe got busted trying to tamper with a US senator’s phone, it kind of freaked Breitbart out,” Brad Friedman, who owns the progressive Brad Blog, told me. Friedman has been on the forefront of reporting on issues and revelations surrounding O’Keefe, including the recent bombshell that the young conservative never actually dressed as a pimp when he went into ACORN offices, a fact that even Breitbart has been forced to acknowledge. He has also been a frequent recipient of the conservative’s scorn, especially via @ replies on his Twitter account. At one point he even jokingly suggested that Friedman should be subjected to capital punishment.

“We’re his only threat,” Friedman said, referring to progressive bloggers. He cited the New York Times’ reluctance to offer retractions for its erroneous reporting on O’Keefe’s pimp outfit as an example of the traditional media’s hesitation to go after Breitbart. “[The mainstream media's] scared to death of him, because they don’t know how to stand up to bullies. And Breitbart is a bully, make no mistake … Unfortunately, the progressive blogosphere and the readers who write letters to the [Times'] public editor, demanding a correction, we’re the only threat to Breitbart.”

Lately, Breitbart has been increasingly retweeting links from his detractors, links that often lead to blog posts and articles that are critical of him. Though he doesn’t offer commentary with the retweet, his followers often do so for him. Pazienza, for instance, was surprised one day when he received a flurry of angry @ replies from Breitbart’s followers after the conservative had tweeted a link to a Deus Ex Malcontent post critical of his Big Hollywood site.

“The thing about him beating up on little people on Twitter, that’s not new,” said Tommy Christopher, a correspondent for Mediaite. Chistopher was one of several bloggers who engaged in heated debates with Breitbart during CPAC. He recalled an incident several months ago in which Breitbart retaliated against a Twitter user who had bashed him by posting personal information about her and making vaguely threatening statements. “I spoke to him for like three hours that night, and he got really worked up about it. At the end he admitted that he stepped over the line a little bit, but this is something he does. When people attack him, he basically fights back just as hard.”

Christopher attributed much of Breitbart’s aggressiveness to “paranoia,” something that runs so deep that he’ll lash out at even the smallest criticism, even if it’s coming from someone who doesn’t have much of an audience.

“He’s definitely heaviliy invested in ACORN and O’Keefe and obviously in the outcome of whatever happens to O’Keefe in Louisiana. He has definitely racheted up the belligerence, because he stepped up with the intensity of the attacks. The encounter we had in the hotel [at CPAC] was quite a bit different than any time I’ve intereacted with him in the past.”

Of course, it hasn’t escaped me that this article I’m currently writing isn’t exactly flattering to Breitbart, so forgive me if I indulge in my own paranoia for a moment:

What will happen if and when he reads it?

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Last weekend, Bil Browning received an email from John Aravosis, a gay activist and blogger for AMERICAblog. Aravosis and other bloggers were organizing something called a “blog swarm,” an attempt to essentially create a firehose of public outcry aimed at a single target: the Human Rights Campaign, considered by many to be the most influential LGBT lobbying group. With over 700,000 members, the organization wields significant power, a clout that extends into the White House and Congress.

And, according to those who participated in the blog swarm yesterday, this clout has not been put to good use, specifically in how much pressure it has placed on President Obama to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. “HRC may argue that it’s already told the President it would like to see DADT repealed this year,” Aravosis wrote in his post announcing the swarm. “Well, that’s not enough.”

“I think it’s always a good idea, especially as bloggers and community journalists, to keep our own organizations on the right path,” Browning, who runs the LGBT blog The Bilerico Project, told me in a phone interview. He said that the goal of the project was to create a flood of communication — phone calls, emails, blog posts, and articles — aimed at HRC to convince them that more firm action should be taken on DADT.

Citizen journalists using the web to funnel outrage to a small, influential group of individuals have had mixed results in the past. While a campaign organized by Color of Change recently led to several sponsors reneging their support for far-right extremist Glenn Beck, a similar campaign launched by the popular Consumerist blog aimed at NBC execs did not stop the company from letting go Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien.

Browning told me that their cause was aided by the fact that several more mainstream liberal blogs — outside of the LGBT-specific niche — had joined in on the swarm. “I think we’re all part of a larger progressive community and I think one of the problems that we’ve had in the LGBT organization, is that we haven’t reached out to the allies who write about labor, heath care reform, immigration reform,” he said. “There are a lot of areas that affect LGBT people too, but we just seem to be kind of off on our own working on our own thing. It can’t keep going on, and this is a good example where working in a coalition with other progressive blogs and organizations works.”

Those non-LGBT blogs range from Daily Kos to Taylor Marsh, and since the blog swarm launched yesterday, dozens of bloggers and hundreds of Twitter and Facebook users have joined in, indicating a critical mass in which the momentum of the swarm became self-perpetuating.

It has been a little over 24 hours since the swarm launched, and already the HRC has issued responses, mainly defending itself. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has to be repealed this year,” a spokesman told POLITICO. “That has been the Human Rights Campaign’s position from the start, and at this point there is no one in the White House who does not know it … We have been lobbying the White House relentlessly, and we’ve seen more movement in recent weeks than in the previous 16 years.”

So while the HRC may not necessarily be promising a change in strategy, they certainly are listening, and as expected the blog swarm is in effect spilling over into the mainstream media and adding to the national conversation. Sometimes, it’s not just about influencing a single organization, but bringing once-private discussions out into the open. Given the recent drove of news reports about increased pressure to repeal DADT, these bloggers could not have picked a better time to turn up the heat.

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