New Media Leaving Old Media For Newer Media

"The Daily Dish" is abandoning the Atlantic Monthly Group for "The Daily Beast."

The Hackosphere Matures

From Andrew Sullivan, a welcome if tardy acknowledgment that bloggers should observe traditional journalistic standards.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, when another web site published the fabricated story that Sarah Palin wasn't the mother of her youngest child, Sullivan linked to it before checking the facts and thus lent his substantial prestige to the most effective libel of the campaign.

With reasons that seem to have to do with professional pride and his considerable and understandable alarm at the idea of Palin ever getting close to the White House again, Sullivan hasn't quite given up on the pass-the-baby story. But whether it's a question of ethics, potential legal liability for his publisher, the Atlantic Monthly Group, or both, he's tightened up procedures at The Daily Dish. This week, when the National Inquirer published a story about the Palins, he wrote:

I'm not linking because I have no way to confirm the story.

Sullivan Still Trying To Evade The Trigonometry

Responding to Matt Labash at "The Weekly Standard," Andrew Sullivan denies that "I have 'advance[d] conspiracy theories that [Sarah Palin] is not the biological mother of Trig.' I would ask Labash to explain what conspiracy theory I have advanced."

That's easy: Right here. Does he really think no one remembers? In August 2008 a blog that evidently got the idea from an episode of "Desperate Housewives" claimed that Palin wasn't really the mother of her son Trig. Without checking the facts, Sullivan used his Atlantic Monthly Group-published blog to advance, or, rather, catapult the story into national prominence.

The originating site retracted the story almost immediately, but it was too late. By conferring respectability on the lie, Sullivan single-handedly made it the most effective libel of the 2008 campaign. His continuing demand that Palin provide proof that she is the mother of her child is the moral equivalent of the absurd, harassing demands of the Obama birthers. His flagrant journalistic lapse will mar his reputation forever.

Last One Singing, Wins

Andrew Sullivan runs the most important political blog in the world. For the second time in a little over a year, he's suspended publication because he's completely distracted by Sarah Palin. This time, he's published a grandiloquent "To Our Readers" flourish saying that he needs to close up shop so he and his colleagues can read and analyze her cheesy memoir.

Over Labor Day weekend in 2008, he republished a shameful lie about Palin and her minor daughter without checking the facts. He's never apologized. Instead, he stubbornly defended his action, and even now he's doing what he can to keep the lie alive. It has become obvious that Sullivan is still desperately hoping to uncover evidence that Palin is not the biological mother of her youngest child. He writes today:

There is a possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination.

Sullivan is coming pretty close to staking his reputation on this. If he were right, it would destroy Palin, not to mention also destroy or harm scores of other people who would've needed to be involved (including, of course, the other Palin children). If he's wrong, which seems glaringly obvious, his reputation won't soon recover. Also, he may yet expose his publisher, the Atlantic Monthly Group, to a libel suit should Palin decide she can show that he has acted with malice (a charge he would seem to invite when he attacks her using sexually-charged language) and with reckless disregard for the truth.

So turn off your cell phones and pagers, and don't rustle your librettos. Sullivan vs. Palin has become an operatic death match.

A Blogging Fool's Paradise

Earlier in the year, Matthew Yglesias left the Atlantic Monthly blogpen, settling under the wing of the progressive (I always want to write "self-styled" in front of that word; where does it leave the rest of us?) Center for American Progress Action Fund. If you click here, never again will you see such a group of highly qualified and earnest-looking young people.

At about 10:30 last night, a Fund official posted this on Yglesias's blog:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

That's because on Dec. 19, Yglesias had written:

[Third Way's] domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist [BS].

The brass at Third Way, another think tank, must've asked their friends at CAPAF why they were being trashed on a Center web site. After Palmieri's post, over 500 comments on Yglesias's site ensued, but none as ironic as when Sullivan, back at Yglesias' old hang at the Atlantic, said today that Palmieri's comment is:

What happens when someone mistakes a journalist for a member of some dumb-ass Politburo.

So now the blogger is a journalist again. When Sullivan was defending himself for having republished a lie about Gov. Palin, her minor daughter, and Trig on his own site, he took pains to make distinctions between the rules for journalists and bloggers. For instance, he didn't have to check the Trig Palin story out first, he said. By republishing it before checking the facts and then keeping it alive for months, he was just asking questions (which jounalists do, of course, before they run their stories).

Defending Yglesias against his web site's host's inteference, Sullivan reverts to yet another pillar of the old journalistic paradigm whereby a newpaper publisher was expected to keep his or her hands off the newsroom.

So in Sullivan's blogger's paradise, writers have it both ways. They can publish whatever they want without abiding by old-school notions about accuracy and due diligence. If by their actions they expose their publishers to libel suits (as Sullivan may have by republishing the Trig story at the Atlantic Monthly Group) or interfere with a business or collegial relationship being enjoyed by those paying the bills (as Yglesias evidently did), too bad. We'll have to see how long before paradise is lost in a courtroom.