Great example of how the right-wing exaggerates. A Poor choice of controlling what a reporter had access to when Biden came to Winter Park for a fundraiser turned into an accusation of a kidnapping by the time it reached the Drudge Report.
How my wait in a closet almost brought down the White house
While I was in the closet, getting impatient and annoyed, I snapped a picture with my cell phone and e-mailed it to my editor, Bob Shaw, explaining that this is where I was at, and this is why I wouldn’t be filing anything about the party before the speeches. He wrote up an item and posted it, with the picture, on this blog. His post was a bit snarky. He likes snarky. So do I. I thought it was funny. The post and picture also ran in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper the next morning, along with my write-up of Biden’s speech. People told me they thought it was funny.
The vice president’s press secretary, Elizabeth Alexander, e-mailed me an apology, which I accepted. (Today we talked and she said that the choice of rooms was a screw-up by an inexperienced staffer and would never happen again.) Ginsburg called me with an apology, saying he had known nothing about what happened and was very upset by it, and I accepted his apology too. Aside from a couple other e-mails and phone calls, I’d pretty much forgotten all about the event and moved on to other stories I was working on.
Then the blogosphere went crazy. Saturday afternoon a well-known political blogger, Joe Curl at the DrudgeReport, called me at home and said various Internet blogs were reporting that I had been kidnapped and held hostage in a locked closet by the vice president’s staff. Bloggers around the country, it seems, had determined that either we had published a story on-line luridly detailing the alleged kidnapping, then later removed it, or we chose to not write about it at all. Either way, we were shilling for Biden and the Democrats.
So I talked to Joe, and he posted a decent account on Drudge. I thought that would end it, but it only opened flood gates, from other media. Some I talked to, hoping to clarify the matter. But I discovered that whatever I said was irrelevant to other bloggers and posters who concluded that I was spin-controlling, continuing the cover-up. Some called me a liar and worse. But the real vile was naturally aimed at Biden.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2011/03/how-my-wait-in-a-closet-almost-brought-down-the-white-house.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
