How The Foley Story Broke - I Find This Puzzling
Apparently the Mark Foley story first broke on this new blog, StopSexPredartors.blogspot.com, which started in July and brought down the Congressional leadership with its sixth, seventh and eighth posts.
Color me skeptical. Maybe the blog author was an unwitting catspaw, but I would want some assurance that this was not simply a successful attempt to promote a story that wasn't quite ready for the Mainstream Media by laundering it through some blogs (and wasn't that Matt Drudge's ecological niche, back in the day?). And part of my suspicion arises because the blog posted emails about gay Congressmen in repsonse to a post about "skinterns", scantily clad young women. Where were the emails about Dirty Old Men and Sweet Young Things of the female persuasion?
The River City Mud Bugle has even more backstory:
Two hours later [following the first posting of the former page's emails], someone writing under the name “WHInternNow†published a diary on Daily Kos linking to Stop Sex Predators. The diary was met with skepticism from Daily Kos users, and received only a few largely critical comments. “This diary makes an accusation,†one commenter wrote, “a serious accusation, but provides no evidence to back it up.â€
In a previous Daily Kos diary about Foley, “WHInternNow†made an early attempt to draw attention to Foley’s peccadilloes.
The Real Problem With Foley (0 / 0)
It’s not that he’s gay. It’s that he constantly hits on underage interns on The Hill. You guys talk about an “open secret†well Foley’s eye for the young boys in the White House and around the Capitol is what has the Republican bosses scared to death. It’s just wrong that this guy can hit on young boys and still be in the leadership.
by WHInternNow on Tue Sep 05, 2006 at 07:48:09 PM CDT
The story was evidently not quite good enough for the D Kos, but ABC found enough to run with it.
This Editor's Note from the St. Petersburg Times explaining their handling of the story raises more questions:
In November of last year, we were given copies of an email exchange Foley had with a former page from Louisiana. Other news organizations later got them, too. The conversation in those emails was friendly chit-chat.
Foley asked the boy about how he had come through Hurricane Katrina and about the boy's upcoming birthday. In one of those emails, Foley casually asked the teen to send him a "pic" of himself. Also among those emails was the page's exchange with a congressional staffer in the office of Rep. Alexander, who had been the teen's sponsor in the page program.
The teen shared his exchange he'd had with Foley and asked the staffer if she thought Foley was out of bounds.
There was nothing overtly sexual in the emails, but we assigned two reporters to find out more. We found the Louisiana page and talked with him. He told us Foley's request for a photo made him uncomfortable so he never responded, but both he and his parents made clear we could not use his name if we wrote a story.
We also found another page who was willing to go on the record, but his experience with Foley was different. He said Foley did send a few emails but never said anything in them that he found inappropriate. We tried to find other pages but had no luck. We spoke with Rep. Alexander, who said the boy's family didn't want it pursued, and Foley, who insisted he was merely trying to be friendly and never wanted to make the page uncomfortable.
So, what we had was a set of emails between Foley and a teenager, who wouldn't go on the record about how those emails made him feel. As we said in today's paper, our policy is that we don't make accusations against people using unnamed sources. And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing. After much discussion among top editors at the paper, we concluded that the information we had on Foley last November didn't meet our standard for publication. Evidently, other news organizations felt the same way.
Since that time, we revisited the question more than once, but never learned anything that changed our position. The Louisiana boy's emails broke into the open last weekend, when a blogger got copies and posted them online.
Later that week, on Thursday, a news blog at the website of ABC News followed suit, with the addition of one new fact: Foley's Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, was on the record about the Louisiana boy's emails and was calling for an investigation. That's when we wrote our first story, for Friday's papers.
After ABC News broke the story on its website, someone contacted ABC and provided a detailed email exchange between Foley and at least one other page that was far different from what we had seen before. This was overtly sexual, not something Foley could dismiss as misinterpreted friendliness.
That's what drove Foley to resign on Friday.
Fine, but - why was Foley's opponent so sure that he had a solid accusation? Or was it a lucky shot in the dark?
And how did ABC round up the follow-up emails and IMs so quickly?
And was it the page in Louisiana who sent his Foley emails to an unknown web-site after declining to push this story with the St. Petersburg Times? Maybe - the St. Petersburg Times would not let him make an anonymous accusation. OTOH, if the former page was so determined to get Foley, why didn't he try another news organization - ABC, for example, didn't seem to have a problem with anonymously sourcing this.
And if it was *not* the page from Louisiana who sent the emails to StopSexPredators, who did?
Baffling.
KEEPING HOPE ALIVE: I welcome some help in sorting out the dates of the second wave of lurid emails and IMs. For example, one of them - "strip down and get relaxed" - was from 2003. If none of them are from 2006, then one might hope that the leadership intervention was effective.
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/10/i_smell_a_rat.html
