Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 4 NewsBusters post by Al Brown respresents the emergence of a new attempt to counter the Mark Foley story: The media is lying! From Brown's post:
From ABC News [emphasis added]:
ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys under the age of 18.This message was dated April 2003, at approximately 7 p.m., according to the message time stamp.
But blogger William Kerr of Passionate America says that he has identified the former page, that he is 21 now, and that he was 18 at the time the instant messages were exchanged.
[...]
That would make ABC's story of an "underage" page being stalked by a predator a story about two consenting adults exchanging instant messages. Did Brian Ross know this, or did he willfully lie in order to run with the story and "get" the Republicans five weeks before the elections?
By focusing on this one claim -- that one of the pages Foley chatted up was 18, not "under 18" -- Brown ignores the entire creepy pattern of Foley chatting up numerous pages.
A better question: Will Brown take Sean Hannity and National Review's Andy McCarthy to task for telling the "willful lie" that Monica Lewinsky was 19 at the time of her dalliance with President Clinton? (In fact, she was 22.)
