Politico Pulls A 180 When It Comes To Fighting Smears

I decided I'd go all "investigative blogger" on everyone this morning and check out how Politico covered Obamas "fight the smears" website and how it covered Palin fighting a smear. First here is Ben Smiths take on Obama:

Wired's Thomas Goetz emails to make a great point about Obama's big FightTheSmears.com rollout today:

By putting their own website out there front-and-center, and then getting everybody to link to it (starting with all the media covering the launch of the site), the result will be to drive fightthesmears.com towards the top of a Google search on, say, "obama muslim" or "michelle obama whitey." Ideally, if enough of the pro-Obama network links to fightthesmears.com, it'll drive the sites that peddle in the rumor-mongering, which are now the first results on said searches, off the top of the results list. Ideal long term result: any curious low-information voter who eventually bothers to google these pesky rumors will immediately be led to the debunking rather than the rumor.

My take: Did the Obama campaign create fightthesmears.com to game Google? If so, they're even more net-savvy than folks give them credit for.

Indeed, Obama already had a protype of this page connected to his Fact Check site, and even bought Google ads linking it. But this wave of publicity will probably push the new site to the top of Google to stay.

So not surprisingly Politico links to a story which portrays the Obama campaign as "even more net-savvy than folks give them credit for" for fighting these smears. Now when Palin fights a smear here is how Politico covers it:

Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman Saturday took the unusual step of posting a statement on Facebook denying an anonymous blog report that the former Alaska governor was getting a divorce and moving to Montana.

Um, was Martin not around during the campaign when Obama was "fighting the smears." How is that now unusual.

By having her spokeswoman repeat the charges to rebut them in a public form, Palin effectively guaranteed coverage from the mainstream media that otherwise would not report claims attributed to unnamed sources on an anonymous blog.

This would lead you to believe that Martin feels stories left on the web can't really do much damage if they're not covered by the msm. Only problem is this contradicts a story he and Ben Smith wrote on July 28,2008.

For all the media attention his historic run has attracted, not to mention the quarter-billion dollars he has already spent introducing himself to the nation, 25 percent of respondents in a recent Newsweek poll wrongly believe he was raised as a Muslim and nearly 40 percent errantly thought he attended a Muslim school while growing up abroad.

These incorrect claims have also come up repeatedly in Politico interviews with voters, including Democrats and independents.

Kathie Steigerwald, a Dearborn, Mich. businesswoman who said she voted for Hillary Clinton but now plans to support McCain, offered an especially succinct recital of a narrative on which other interviewees offered numerous variations:

"I feel John McCain is a true American and I want to support a true American," she said.

But isn't Obama a "true American?" she was asked.

"I don't know," she said after a measured pause. "I question it."

Why?

"I don't know — maybe because of his name?"

Whatever his motives, McCain’s new hit on his foe’s patriotism hints at two years of whispered, viral rumors and myths about Obama centered on his patriotism and American values, or, more to the point, his lack thereof. The e-mails —cataloged in Snopes.com's lengthy Obama section and Obama's own “fight the smears" page — often have contradictory particulars, but the thrust is clear: Obama, various false e-mails claim, is not really a natural-born American citizen, is not really a Christian and refuses to pledge allegiance to the American flag.

Not only does Martin cite a poll but he interviews a woman to prove that a viral web campaign of rumors can damage a politicians reputation. So how does he square this with his questioning of Palin squashing a rumor before it gets out of control? Could it be that Martin is just another hack "journalist?"

UPDATE- Here is yet another article by Martin and Smith which shows how hard it can be to stop rumors once they have spread across the internet.

Ironically, the smear campaign represents the dark side of the Internet’s emerging dominance in American politics — a phenomenon that has driven Obama’s unparalleled grass-roots and financial campaigns. After harnessing the Web to great advantage, Obama is now struggling to beat back the viral threat from the same uncontrollable medium.

Voters widely and repeatedly cite information that has been gleaned directly or indirectly from the e-mails to explain why they won’t support Obama.

Obama’s campaign has built a pioneering Web-based apparatus to debunk the myths, but the candidate himself has also begun to fight back against the smear in symbolic and substantive ways...

JMart exposed