So, I wrote Danny Glover a note this morning about his coverage of the brouhaha online over John Edwards' hiring of Pandagon blogger Amanda Marcotte to be his campaign blog-master. (If you think this controversy isn't roiling the political blogosphere, just take a look at this over-the-top performance by A-list rightwing blogger Michele Malkin). I got a reply within minutes from Danny. Here's the text of what I wrote, followed by his reply, and some further back and forth. If you think this is a tempest in a teapot, skip this post. I've been going back and forth all morning wondering if it's worth the effort. But ultimately I do think we have a serious issue here, one that is going to keep coming up as anyone who blogs goes to work for campaigns. Glover has set himself up at National Journal as one arbiter of what is or isn't a scandal; I hope he rethinks his position on this, because we should save that charged word for real scandals. Here's our correspondence:

Danny--

Most of your post about "the first blog scandal of 2008" is based on a false premise, one that you essentially withdraw at the bottom of your post, where you update your readers by explaining that the missing posts on Pandagon were the result of technology problems, not some deliberate cover-up. Yet the beginning of your article, which is linked to all over the rightwing blogosphere as evidence in their odd campaign against Amanda Marcotte, is rife with scandal language: accusing her of "apparently delet[ing]" a controversial post about the Duke rape case and later stating "the cover-up is worse than the crime."

But where's the cover-up? If you yourself admit that there was nothing more than technology problems that caused a whole swath of old posts on Pandagon to be lost (a bungled switchover to a new blogging platform, I believe was the reason), then doesn't that neuter the premise of your post? And shouldn't you do something a big more definitive than post an update? More like a retraction?

I wouldn't harp on this so much because I know we can all make mistakes in this business, but given that National Journal is a pretty reputable publication and a lot of people see it as an objective, careful source of coverage, I think that raises the bar. Also, I am genuinely troubled by the notion that when a candidate hires a blogger to work for their campaign, it means the campaign must implicitly be endorsing everything that blogger has ever written. Not only is there a double standard at work here (when a campaign hires a communications director who had previous worked for a different candidate with different positions on issues, does that mean the new campaign has just endorsed all those previous positions?), in our new age of Google and the WayBack Machine, the idea that people are going to play gotcha with stuff we wrote on blogs or posted somewhere as defining us forever in time is really a dangerous one. It will make the old form of political correctness policing seem like a nursery game.

Best,

Micah

And here's Danny's reply:

Micah,

You accuse me of overreaching in my post and to the extent that I mentioned the Jesse Taylor disclosure post last year, you are correct. I already apologized for including that in the article.

But now you are the one overreaching. My coverage of the Marcotte story is based on a true premise, one that Marcotte herself confirmed. She admitted to deleting and rewriting a post: http://pandagon.net/2007/02/04/and-here-i-thought-i-was-done-malkinswatching#comment-353497. She said she did not intend it as a cover-up, and I can accept that. But the fact is that she did it, so the premise of my coverage is true.

You really should get your own facts straight before you start trashing me and National Journal.

Furthermore, your insinuation that this is a gotcha game manufactured by right-wing bloggers is ridiculous. Much of the story traces back to a North Carolina blogger who openly stated that he supports Barack Obama, a Democrat, for president. I linked to and mentioned that in my story (http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/02/edwards-fiasco.html), as well as providing critical comments from a forum at TalkLeft.

Why did you ignore that information? And why would you ignore the criticisms of Marcotte that are within the comments section of the post you linked at EzraKlein.com?

I do think a retraction is in order; I don't think I'm the one who should be making it.

Danny

I wrote back:

I'm sorry, I'm confused. When someone admits to deleting and rewriting something, which in Marcotte's case she says she's done in order to clarify her position on the Duke case, how is that a cover-up? Cover-up is when you claim not to have done something that you did, isn't it? If she was denying deleting the post that would be something else, no?

As for "insinuating" anything, I don't think I said anywhere that this story was originally manufactured by rightwingers or that the ONLY people writing about possible concerns around Edwards' hiring of Marcotte were rightwingers. (That KC Johnson blogger seems to be quite a piece of work with one major obsession on the Duke case.) I did say they were hyping it (see Michele Malkin's blog and video, exhibit A). Do you disagree that they are hyping it?

Seriously Danny, what level offense are we talking about here for Marcotte? Does this rise to the level of "scandal" or "cover-up"? That's all I'm asking you to rethink.

Micah

He replied:

I'm confused. In your e-mail, you said the premise for my story was false because no posts were deleted. You now acknowledge that a post -- the post that was the key focus of my coverage -- was deleted and rewritten. Is the premise still false in your mind?

To which I wrote:

Danny--

I think we're getting snarled by semantics. Let me posit this: When someone deletes something, and hides that fact, denies doing it, that's a cover-up. When someone deletes something, says she's done so because she wants to clarify her position, it is still a deletion of a post, technically, but it is not a cover-up. Is it? What am I missing?

And now we're getting to the end of this cycle...he replied:

To you and Marcotte's defenders it is not a cover-up; to many of Marcotte's critics across the political spectrum, it clearly is. What you're missing is that I cover such debates all the time. It's why Beltway Blogroll exists. I even created a "blog scandals" category because so many of these campaign-related controversies were cropping up last year.

And I replied:

OK, so I guess our discussion of this topic has reached a dead end. I'm sorry to see that. I guess we disagree about what constitutes a scandal or a cover-up.

Looking over this whole thread, I can see that some confusion arose from my original post, which didn't distinguish explicitly between Marcotte's having deleted and reposted her item on the Duke case and the charge that she had deleted many posts from her blog in an effort to cover-up some kind of thought crime or something. The latter was explained by their technology foul-up, the former by Marcotte herself saying on her blog, I am deleting this item and here is my considered position on the Duke case.

But I'm sorry, when a blogger admits they've made a change in a post, that is not a cover-up, and I am not taking this position because I have some ideological affinity with Marcotte, as Danny suggests in his last email to me. It may be embarrassing to that blogger, it may be a mistake, but we are all human, aren't we? Isn't that what this new communications medium is supposed to be about? Not to the gotcha brigade, I guess.

Technorati Tags: Amanda Marcotte, blogger ethics, Danny Glover, gotcha politics, Michele Malkin, transparency

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