If you’re curious about Bob McGovern, the Santa Barbara professional “intuitive” who’s in the middle of the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal, please humor me and take this two-step test:

1. Read this. Pay particular attention to the date on it.
2. Read this. Try to find a link, or any reference whatsoever, to step 1.

Weird, huh? Deceiver was the only place talking about this stuff for at least a week and a half, but all of a sudden everybody else has been doing original research on the Margaret Sweet connection the whole time? Or maybe it doesn’t count as research when we do it, since we’re just a silly gossip blog with a hot-pink logo. Maybe that’s it. (Please see Update 3 below for a more thorough explanation of this.)

Dear Serge F. Kovaleski, Patrick Healy, Toby Lyles, and everybody else at the New York Times:

You know the blogs and tabloids beat you to this story. Everybody knows. It wasn’t exactly difficult, considering you guys waited almost three weeks for John Edwards to give you permission. You’re not going to salvage your reputation by pretending otherwise.

Also, somebody should talk to your headline writer. “Behind a Meeting That Exposed Edwards’s Affair”? Why not just type out the equivalent number of Z’s?

Signed,
Your uncredited researcher

Update: Looks like ABC News doesn’t think we’re worth citing either. Watch this video, and pay close attention about 43 seconds in. Where did they get the URL for the cached copy (now blocked) of Being Is Free? According to Google Blog Search, Deceiver was the first place to note the existence of that URL (here), and only a few other places have linked to it, at our prompting. If I seem nitpicky about this, it’s because for weeks I’ve been hammering on the disappearance of all sorts of online information about the principals in this story. And nobody’s been paying attention. Or so I thought, until these guys started acting like they pulled this stuff out of thin air. Don’t they talk about attribution in journalism school? (Hat tip, once again: Fortunate Son)

Update 2: And just so it doesn’t look like I’m doing the same thing: I got an anonymous tip about the Egyptian Wayback Machine cache of beingisfree.org, which in turn probably derived from this Twitter by the Stranahans. And the Margaret Sweet stuff came from a tipster too. So I wasn’t the first person in the history of the world to find out about it. But Deceiver was the only place where the NYT and ABC could have found that specific information about the deletions, what was there before the deletions, and what it all means in the context of this whole disaster, because Deceiver was the first to cover it. (To my knowledge, Jossip and DBKP are the only other places that have talked about it in any detail, and they gave us proper attribution and a link for showing it to them. Because they realize why that’s important.) As far as I can determine, anyway. If somebody out there has better information, please let me know.

Update 3: Another thing I don’t think I made clear above is that there was a very brief window of time when this information was available. The beingisfree.org cache was discovered on 7/26, I posted about it on 7/30 and 7/31, and it was blocked on 8/2. If a few other people and I hadn’t saved it to our hard drives, it would be completely gone now. Likewise, the “Helpful Dudes” page on MargaretSweet.com was deleted on 7/24, I got the tip about the Google cache with the relevant info on 7/31 and posted about it that day, and the next day the cache was updated and that info was gone. So I’m very confident in saying that if this stuff hadn’t been posted to Deceiver, we wouldn’t be seeing it on ABC and in the NYT now. They need to explain themselves. Not that I think they will, because they’re too arrogant to admit how much they’ve embarrassed themselves throughout this whole story, but they need to.

In other news that apparently isn’t news until some jerk at the New York Times pretends he found it himself:

Continue reading ‘Deceiver Scoops New York Times (And ABC News!)’