To post or not to post

Mark Kleiman believes that it was in “extreme bad taste” for me to post on the Kerry business: So far only Drezner and some of the British papers, among the non-sleazaloid media, have picked this up. No self-respecting media outlet should be prepared to take this sort of unsourced second-hand sludge and run with it. ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Mark Kleiman believes that it was in "extreme bad taste" for me to post on the Kerry business:

Mark Kleiman believes that it was in “extreme bad taste” for me to post on the Kerry business:

So far only Drezner and some of the British papers, among the non-sleazaloid media, have picked this up. No self-respecting media outlet should be prepared to take this sort of unsourced second-hand sludge and run with it. We don’t even know the name of the woman he’s supposed to have been dating, making the story completely impossible to check.

Some readers agree. First off — Mark’s facts are wrong. By the time I got around to posting on it, I’d seen blogposts from DailyKos, Atrios, Instapundit, and Andrew Sullivan, about the story. According to Jonah Goldberg, this allegation was first posted by a Wesley Clark blogger last week. Mark is also incorrect is saying that the Drudge Report and the National Enquirer story about Kerry are talking about the same thing. See John Hawkins on this. Second, I linked and quoted the DailyKos post at greater length, in large part because Kos’ points on this were way more specific than Drudge’s. He also confirmed that Wes Clark made statement about the Kerry situation to reporters. As I said before, what interests me is how the story got to Drudge. If it’s from Clark, it would appear to fit in with this characterization of generals who fail at politics. I’ll close with Andrew Sullivan’s point on this, because it’s true:

[T]he internet has ended any semblance of a barrier between respectable news and gossip. Once Drudge has posted, the story is public. This is an awful development, but it is real. I should also say: I know of no hard evidence that this rumor is even faintly true. But true or not, if the Republicans planted it, they should be excoriated. If a rival Democratic candidate did, ditto.

UPDATE: Tim Noah has the full list of rationales — mine are #3 and #8.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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