Credit Where It's Due: Politico Reports While Mediaite Scratches Head

A tale of two stories.

Politico took a cautious, yet objective approach to the #Weinergate story:

A photo of a man’s bulging gray boxer-brief underwear was posted to Weiner’s account with yfrog — an online image-sharing site — on Saturday night, according to biggovernment.com, which is run by Andrew Breitbart. The photograph is from the waist down, and shows no face.

“The weiner [sic] gags never get old, I guess, ” the veteran lawmaker emailed a POLITICO reporter in response on Saturday.

[…]

Weiner’s office — generally one of the most press friendly around — did not respond to a request for comment on whether he has contacted federal authorities to report the alleged cyber-attack, which could fall under laws prohibiting cyberhacking and impersonating federal officials.

Reporting basically what Big Journalism and Big Government first reported last night, Politico was objective, and just like the former, laid out the facts for readers to make up their own minds.

Meanwhile, Mediaite chose to bury the actual story as it would better demonstrate journalism to attack Andrew Breitbart.

Somewhere in between all these tweets, however, an anonymous writer on Big Government under the pseudonym “Publius” (who is a regular contributor at BG) claims the account sent out the following picture to a Twitter user they chose not to identify.

[…]

Also notable is the fact that this post’s author, Publius, is entirely anonymous. Why didn’t someone with a real identity and something to lose sign off on this?

Entirely anonymous? Does Frances Martel bother to click links or was she too busy working angles that have nothing to do with the actual story into her “libertarian” piece. Apparently Martel cannot define or identify the purpose of an editorial byline.

The totally anonymous editorial byline!

Why would Andrew Breitbart, who already faces an uphill credibility battle- wrongfully or otherwise- thanks to Shirley Sherrod (and, he claims, Glenn Beck) put it all in the line, particularly in such a sleazy way?

[…]

But how would he have “much more” on the Congressman on such a happenstance occurrence, and isn’t it a little bit too convenient that Congressman Weiner would have a sexy pic scandal?

It is too convenient. Let’s forget about it. That’s what an unbiased, objective media would do.

Good thing Politico picked up the slack.

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