Worst. Warm-up man. Ever. Oh, I know, let’s have the guy who just nailed your ass to the wall get the crowd ready!
I’ll be watching.
Thoughts that I genuinely have every time any politician announces a press conference: whether Jon Stewart will be able to change his opening monologue in time to comment on said event. Looks like this one is going to come down to the wire…
Also, the WaPo reports that ABC has been in touch with the woman who received the photos and will be naming the woman in an upcoming report.
Wienergate gets some fresh photos from Breitbart: So apparently, BigGovernment and BigJournalism claim that they have new photos of Anthony Wiener. “We will be updating BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com throughout the day with photographs, timelines, and other clarifying details,” our boy Andrew Breitbart writes. “However, we will not be releasing all of the material because some of it is of an extreme, graphic nature.” Here’s one of the photos. It’s Anthony Wiener with an animal that doubles as an euphemism. So graphic. (h/t aceface905)
A word of warning before you click: The language is R-rated (complete with gross headline) and some of the photos are racy. But even if you don’t click, before you get too comfortable, it’s worth noting that, according to The Daily, TweetCongress’ records have Anthony Weiner’s uh … weiner … coming from TweetDeck, not yFrog. Which may blow a hole in an important theory about how his account was hacked. The Village Voice has an article on that, too. Actual evidence or gross right-wing bloggers? Pick your poison.
Anthony Weiner’s got a lot of problems this week, but they’re sorta inflated. First off, the story is kind of at a point where fatigue is very high. However, despite technical evidence, including a very obvious yFrog flaw that would’ve made it easy to post a rogue tweet on Weiner’s account, the congressman’s performance this week has proven to be a complete liability, giving conservatives enough rope to hang him with. (By the way, just wanted to point out — we discovered the @PatriotUSA76 angle 15 hours before DailyKos broke it.) But at this point, only the die-hards are really, truly following this story. One of them, by the way, is a reporter for Mediaite — Tommy Christopher. We criticized Mediaite for their aggressive coverage Thursday but will give some credit today. You guys did some good work that deserves praise. More info:
We love Mediaite (they did a great interview with us a while back), but man oh man do we agree with Gawker. No single news source has owned Weinergate like Mediaite. Maybe now’s the time to take a breather? Possibly?
“I shouldn’t go back to the Weiner well, but I … can’t … stop … myself.” - Jon Healey, LA Times
This is one of those weeks where I despise the media more than I love it.
In a completely unrealistic U. S. of A., King of Misleading Information Andrew Brietbart would have investigated the photo’s origin. In a completely realistic world, bloggers did the work for him. Of course, the story doesn’t end here. Throw the web traffic/ratings-hungry media outlets in there and you’ve got the current circus.
What makes me most angry here is the distraction. Our collective attention span is so horribly limited that even the most questionable facade of a “scandal” morphs into the hot button issue.
Meanwhile:
- High unemployment still persists
- Wall Street’s doin’ just fine
- Your taxpayer dollars are funding clip art projects
- Republicans still hate poor people
- A “Path to Prosperity” now means seniors get financially screwed
- Politicians continue to mislead their constituents by grasping to talking points that seem to work
- Someone intended to assassinate Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses with the plan to “line them up all in a row, get a machine gun, and mow them all down,”
- Children are being murdered in a country’s upheaval
- A murderous dictator would still rather die than leave the country
But penis jokes! Those never get old.
Why take the time and effort to investigate this story when you could lead with a question? Or make the dick references every person on this planet already thought of?
I can’t pretend this is somehow a phenomenon. We distract ourselves like this all the time and news orgs do what they can to catch that dwindling attention. No matter where this story goes, I’m sure we’ll go through this inane cycle again soon enough.
Goddamnit, we were just about to post something else on this mess (regarding Weiner’s pathethic PR skills today) when PP talked us over the edge. We’ve tried to avoid this story, but keep getting sucked in. Although we regret nothing about the Alvin Greene post. That was just classic Alvin. Please, someone throw something at us if we give this story a disproportionate amount of play.
Refusing to yield questions from reporters on the subject of an alleged photo that was tweeted out through his account over the weekend, New York Representative Anthony Weiner called one journalist a “jackass.” Weiner has claimed the photo scandal is a distraction from other issues on Capitol Hill. [CNN video]
We promised ourselves we weren’t going to post about this for a while … but GOD. Could Weiner have found a worse way to handle this situation? Whether or not he actually did anything wrong? This is the moment you keep your head down, brah. Now, by answering questions with non-answers, you’ve made the story more prominent.
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So, a guy who has been building exactly this narrative for months turns out to be the one and only unique retweet of the picture in question? Just as Rep. Weiner’s cryptic hashtag about the Seattle time zone is reason to raise reasonable flag of suspicion, so too is this.Mediaite’s Colby Hall • Who noticed the same trend we did with the Rep. Anthony Weiner saga yesterday — that the guy who retweeted the Weiner thing (which took place nearly half an hour before the BigGovernment post first went up) appeared to be going out of his way to build up a narrative that suggested a saga like the one that actually happened weeks before it actually did. The person who was targeted by the rogue tweet wrote an exclusive statement for the New York Daily News where she noted the same thing — that this specific Twitter user harassed her. We think that this evidence suggests strongly that Weiner’s Twitter account was hacked, rather than Weiner sending the rogue tweet himself. The user’s tweets are suddenly protected, but not before a number of people noticed the trend.
(Source: mediaite.com)
orioninacobweb-deactivated20110 asks: I have no questions; I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your latest post on Anthony Weiner. I thought you went about in exactly the right way, particularly noting your bias at the very beginning. I think keeping biases in mind in the best way to try to approach things from an analytic point of view. I should, of course, admit my bias as well and say that I also sincerely hope there is no truth to this scandal. So, thank you very much :)
» SFB says: Thanks for the comment. We know that tackling the Weiner story might be a little tough considering the guy has a big fan base among the left, but the analysis at least offers something to go by, instead of just denying it out of hand. I’d like to think that even if something goes against our own political lean, we at least air it out. I think it’s important to note that the guy who first retweeted Weiner’s tweet had been looking for a way to hang the guy out to dry for a long time. I err on the side of Weiner getting hacked (it’s too perfect not to be), but there isn’t any firm proof of it. — Ernie @ SFB
whyarethegoodurlsalreadytaken asks: Am I the only one who thinks this whole "Weiner-gate" is being blow out of proportion? I'm a New Yorker, and there is barely no coverage of the incident. Out of the NY Post, the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and the local paper Newsday, only the Post has had any coverage of it. It seems like most of the area has just dismissed the claims all together.
» SFB says: For what it’s worth, The New York Times has essentially ignored a Breitbart original once — with ACORN — only to be caught by surprise after the fact. (Also, the New York Daily News has covered it.) So, from our perspective, it’s better to be ahead of the story and catch what evidence we can than to see the steamroller of a smear campaign do the work for us. If Weiner’s in the right — and we hope he is — we merely want to be sure we exhausted all available options on the story, which has been picked up by large sites people read, like Mediaite and Gawker. — Ernie @ SFB
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