THE EMERGING ANTI-OBAMA INDUSTRY. Over at my other blog, I noticed that Human Events magazine is flacking a massive "expose" on Barack Obama. In the past month, whenever I've written about Obama on my site, which has a Google AdSense account, a link to HumanEvents.com promising "Barack Obama Exposed Check out this FREE special report revealing the real Barack Obama!" appears at the top of the Google Ad strip.
This means that Human Events has bought the adword "Obama" or "Barack Obama," and is paying more for it than others currently purchasing the same adword (that's how a company winds up with a Google Ad higher on the ad strip, rather than ones further down the screen). This can get very expensive, very quickly, raising questions about who is paying for that anti-Obama message to be placed all over the internet -- people Google "Obama" quite frequently these days -- and whether the magazine is using it as a fundraising device.
If you click the link provided, it takes you to a splash page demanding your e-mail address before Human Events will send the "expose" on Obama. That's a classic e-mail harvesting gambit, and e-mails harvested this way can be added to others and sold to, for example, political outfits looking to eventually go after Obama, as well as other conservative groups. Targeted e-mail lists are quite lucrative properties.
The New York Daily News signed up for the report in March, and posted the 32-page "expos�", authored by such journalistic greats as Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilly, and Ben Shapiro, on its own site. It's not that interesting and does little to expose Obama, as opposed to the thinking of G.O.P. writers grappling with his candidacy. But the prevalence of the ad all over the internet this early in the cycle suggests that Obama may go on to experience Hillary Clinton-like levels of negative attention from the VRWC -- if people on the right find that they can fundraise or get new readers by going after him.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
