The National Journal's Danny Glover has one of the most inventive excuses for avoiding actual reporting work that I've ever seen:
One other footnote: Marcotte's behavior the past couple of days reminded me of something I discovered at Pandagon late last year when researching my New York Times article on bloggers who had gone to work for campaigns. One of those bloggers, Jesse Taylor, got his start at Pandagon before joining the campaign of now-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat.
I reported Taylor's move when it happened in October 2005 and linked to his announcement at Pandagon. When I clicked back to Taylor's post in November 2006, it was gone and there was no sign of it in Pandagon's archives. I had to search the Wayback Machine to find Taylor's post again.
Did Marcotte, who claimed ownership of Pandagon upon Taylor's departure, scrub the site of his disclosure, and if so, why? Those questions came to my mind last fall but didn't seem worth asking then. They were just a curiousity.
Now that Marcotte has shown a penchant for deleting Pandagon content that causes her grief, maybe the questions are worth asking -- though I gather that my "whiff of accusatory tone" would just land any query I sent to her in the electronic trash.
Got that? Glover thinks Amanda won't answer him, so he won't even ask. Pretty nifty. Had he asked her -- or, say, another former Pandagon writer, like me -- he'd have been told that Pandagon has endured various server and archive problems over the years, which have led to a fair amount of irrevocable archive deletion. This would have been easy enough to check even without calling Amanda: Just surf forward a day from the absent post and see if its successors are also missing. Or just look at the archives for that month: Everything after October 8th, 2005, is missing. So is everything, incidentally, from my years on the site: A much-missed casualty of server crashes and then a Wordpress overwrite.
So to recap: Glover is insinuating that Amanda deleted the final post of Pandagon's founder in order to, well, it's not really clear, but to do something nefarious. Then Glover decided he wouldn't actually ask her because he didn't expect a response. To make matters worse, he also refrained from looking into the archives to see if there was any pattern or alternative explanation. And he gets paid a salary by an established media outlet to report and intelligently analyze the political blogging scene. As I said: Pretty nifty. Slackers everywhere salute you, Mr. Glover. Your misinformed readership and your bosses, however, may prove somewhat less enthusiastic.
Update: Glover apologizes.
