Front Page Washington Post article today

[Suzu]

Claims that Obama is most popular on youtube.

Here's the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/20/AR2007052001408.html

To email the author: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/email/jose+antonio+vargas/

Here's what I sent:

"Today in 'Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up', you wrote 'No Republican comes close to matching the popularity of another Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, on YouTube'. This is very, very inaccurate. As of this writing, Obama has 5,479 subscribers, and Republican candidate Ron Paul has 7,991.

"That's quite a difference, Mr. Vargas, Mr. Paul was WAY ahead of Obama well before this article went live, and I would appreciate seeing you publish the correct information."

I should probably have come down on him a bit harder. More emails will help.

 

[MsDoodahs]

It's all part of the ignore portion of the program.

Remember what Ghandi said .. they ignore, then they ridicule, then they fight, then you win...

The first three are going to blend together, they don't have specific clear start/stop points.

(Like the grief process - you can bounce back and forth between the stages, it's not a straight line process where you go through each stage and never revisit the last one.)

 

[RonPaul4President]

The Washington Post is in on the Globalism conspiracy. They have a hidden agenda so their opinions are biased and therefore worthless.

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

- David Rockefeller to Trilateral Commission in 1991

Considering Ron Paul's stance on the issues, it is no surprise they'd demonize and ostricize him.

 

[Hawaii Libertarian]

The Washington Post is a Disgrace

There were lots of comments favorable to RP in the Washington Post's blogs following the debates, but they totally ignored them. Not surprisingly, the Washington Post is definitely a purveyor of propaganda, and like the New York Times, there is no hope of getting any objective truth out of them. If anything, they are on the front lines of the smear campaign against Dr. Paul. The Washington Post just got hammered hard by its readers in a blog responding to their ill-thought editorial to restrict participation in the debates even before the Michigan GOP controversy.

I'm disappointed that the rival Washington Times hasn't come out with more on Dr. Paul, but then again, they're pushing the neocon agenda, too.

 

[Suzu]

Do these responses mean that you're not going to email the article's author?

Remember, *he* is not the WP, he is an employee. Maybe a senior editor made that change without his knowledge. Maybe he needs to know the truth, even if the WP owners want to keep it suppressed.

Each person in - or potentially in (depending on OUR actions NOW) - this battle is of inestimable value because of how many others they can reach.

 

[LibertyOrDie]

Maybe we are going about this wrong, why not send all of this info to the other networks. They love nothing more than to bash each other when they are wrong. Let them put each other on the spot and see if we can get RP more publicity!

 

[TaoWarrior]

Great idea!




If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.

If his forces are united, separate them.

-Sun Tzu

 

[Suzu]

The number of RonPaul2008dotcom subscribers on youtube rose by 102 since my original post about an hour ago. Obama's went up by over 300 in the same period. Do you think the WP article helped this to happen?

 

[Hawaii Libertarian]

The Washington Post is a Hopeless Lost Cause

Do these responses mean that you're not going to email the article's author?

Remember, *he* is not the WP, he is an employee. Maybe a senior editor made that change without his knowledge. Maybe he needs to know the truth, even if the WP owners want to keep it suppressed.

Each person in - or potentially in (depending on OUR actions NOW) - this battle is of inestimable value because of how many others they can reach.

By examining the political blogs' readers comments, you can clearly see that the Washington Post and its writers ignore those readers' comments in their own blogs and I suspect their response to a flood of e-mails will be like MSNBC's flippant, demeaning attitude in their latest rankings of the candidates when they said "please stop the e-mails" or something to that effect.

An editor at the Post had to approve posting of the article. They do have an ombudsman that complaints can be submitted to. They also have a "corrections" page where they "correct" what they attribute to their "errors."

Since the Post is clearly slanted and pushing their own agenda, anything related to the truth on the RP Youtube statistics will probably be buried in the fine print on their "corrections page."

I don't object to RP supporters flooding the Post with e-mails if they choose to do so, but I believe there are far more malleable media outlets that still have a semblance of objectivity and accuracy that would be a better use of our limited resources and time. I don't know if the Post is simply careless or if this is part of their smear tactics. Curiously, CNN on Sunday asked a "dated" question about the Michigan GOP leader starting a petition to remove RP from the debate that was "old news" and had been terminated well before the time of the interview.

Even in the face of empirical evidence, the Post got it wrong, but they could probably care less. Until RP shows substantial support in the polls and hopefully a primary victory or two, expect more of the same from the MSM. I fear even the writers at these "liberal" (sic) papers have been preconditioned to believe that e-mails from us RP supporters are automatically spam or freeping and not authentic.

 

[Hawaii Libertarian]

The Bottom Line

The Washington Post is in on the Globalism conspiracy. They have a hidden agenda so their opinions are biased and therefore worthless.

- David Rockefeller to Trilateral Commission in 1991

Considering Ron Paul's stance on the issues, it is no surprise they'd demonize and ostricize him.

I couldn't have said it better myself. That's a good summary of the real NWO enemies Dr. Paul and we as his supporters are up against.

I'm sure the campaign included the Post as an addressee on their latest news release about reaching 8,000 YouTube subscribers, but the Post will probably conveniently ignore that as well.

 

[UtahApocalypse]

Ok Everyone I sent a email and also got a very nice reply:

I Sent This:

Damon sent the following message:

Your article is completely inaccurate. Republican Ron Paul is leading ALL
candidates on youtube. As of 7pm his campaign sent the following
announcement:

May 21, 2007


As of 6:01 p.m. ET today, Congressman Ron Paul's YouTube channel has 8,000
subscribers; giving Dr. Paul a commanding first-place position among all
presidential candidates. Senator Barack Obama remains in second place with
5,749 subscribers.

Ron Paul's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=RonPaul2008dotcom

I would suggest you do more research before posting what comes off as a
biased article.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here is the reply:

Hi,

Thanks very much for reading the piece -- and for your note.

Of course I looked at Rep. Ron Paul's numbers, but I had to think about the
whole article and couldn't possibly write about all the candidates. And
when it comes to YouTube popularity, for example, I wasn't just looking at
the number of subscribers but also the number of views. TechPresident, a
bipartisan group blog, has been an incredible source for me. Check this
out: http://www.techpresident.com/youtube

And, as a measure, I also looked at online fundraising numbers, in addition
to the most recent data from Nielsen/Net Ratings, where Dr. Paul's official
site didn't meet minimum sample-size requirements for Nielsen's analysis.

I will tell you, however, that I've thinking about doing a focused piece on
Dr. Paul and the Web.

Please feel free to forward any other Web-related ideas my way.

Regards, and again thanks,
Jose


Jose Antonio Vargas | Politics
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20071
o | 202-334-4686
c | 202-271-6602
http://www.joseantoniovargas.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I responded with thanx for the quick reply and also supported the idea of a RP internet article. I think we should back off of any e-mail campaign as this reporter is trying to be fair.

 

[giskard]

The sad part is, even if he corrects himself, the correction will be under the "letters" section of the paper, buried on page 21 instead of on the front page.

The lies in the media are breathtaking...

 

[giskard]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here is the reply:

Of course I looked at Rep. Ron Paul's numbers, but I had to think about the
whole article and couldn't possibly write about all the candidates.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What a cop out. The statement "No GOP candidate comes close.." is still an egregious lie. He could have added "with the exception of Ron Paul" and that wouldn't have been "writing about all the candidates".

 

[kylejack]

The guy does have a point there. Barack has 2.8 million channel views while we have 654,000.

 

[mrapathy]

I dont want to offend. I really dont want to hear Dr Paul mention NWO or Illuminati.

generalized facts of seperate organizations is bit better and the overall picture of what they do.

does anyone know who owns Washington Post?
who advertises with them?

emailing authors,editors and posting opinion commentary is good.
but lets not get too carried away so that we look like brownshirts.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

 

[LibertyOrDie]

I will tell you, however, that I've thinking about doing a focused piece on
Dr. Paul and the Web.

Lets keep this positive, maybe in a day or so, some of us could write to him - telling him we had heard from an "Online Community" that he was thinking about doing a piece on RP and encourage him on how good of an idea this would be, and as a "faithful reader" you look forward to seeing it.

 

[NMCB3]

E-Mail sent.

 

[Exponent]

Regarding the http://www.techpresident.com/youtube that the journalist referred to, I checked their site, and saw nice pretty graphs--that left out many of the "2nd-tier" candidates. On their contacts page, I requested that they show all of the officially declared candidates. I refrained from directly mentioning Ron Paul, hopefully that will help avoid any sense of bias. People really seem to dislike Ron Paul supporters. Mostly just pointed out that currently, leaving candidates out because their poll numbers are low will just help cause their poll numbers to be low, thus resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's neither fair nor appropriate, especially at this stage of the race. Hopefully they aren't a group that actually wants that, but there seem to be a lot that do, so I'm not too hopeful. But maybe they'll consider my request.

 

[Hawaii Libertarian]

I'm Glad You Got a Response

Ok Everyone I sent a email and also got a very nice reply:

I Sent This:

Damon sent the following message:

Your article is completely inaccurate. Republican Ron Paul is leading ALL
candidates on youtube. As of 7pm his campaign sent the following
announcement:

May 21, 2007


As of 6:01 p.m. ET today, Congressman Ron Paul's YouTube channel has 8,000
subscribers; giving Dr. Paul a commanding first-place position among all
presidential candidates. Senator Barack Obama remains in second place with
5,749 subscribers.

Ron Paul's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=RonPaul2008dotcom

I would suggest you do more research before posting what comes off as a
biased article.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here is the reply:

Hi,

Thanks very much for reading the piece -- and for your note.

Of course I looked at Rep. Ron Paul's numbers, but I had to think about the
whole article and couldn't possibly write about all the candidates. And
when it comes to YouTube popularity, for example, I wasn't just looking at
the number of subscribers but also the number of views. TechPresident, a
bipartisan group blog, has been an incredible source for me. Check this
out: http://www.techpresident.com/youtube

And, as a measure, I also looked at online fundraising numbers, in addition
to the most recent data from Nielsen/Net Ratings, where Dr. Paul's official
site didn't meet minimum sample-size requirements for Nielsen's analysis.

I will tell you, however, that I've thinking about doing a focused piece on
Dr. Paul and the Web.

Please feel free to forward any other Web-related ideas my way.

Regards, and again thanks,
Jose


Jose Antonio Vargas | Politics
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20071
o | 202-334-4686
c | 202-271-6602
http://www.joseantoniovargas.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I responded with thanx for the quick reply and also supported the idea of a RP internet article. I think we should back off of any e-mail campaign as this reporter is trying to be fair.

I'm glad he chose to respond to you. Hopefully our efforts commenting on their reader blogs helped them come to a realization that RP deserves more than just to be dismissed without a second look.

To be fair, I'll give him and the paper the benefit of the doubt for now, but I anticipate that any article that actually gets published on RP and the internet will be a hit piece, much like the ABC and MSNBC articles that dismissed any significance whatsoever to the online poll results and web presence to a highly organized effort by a small number of tech-savvy RP enthusiasts to over-inflate his actual support.

BTW, the Washington Post also owns Newsweek magazine, and not surprisingly, even Chris Matthews has described the Post as a neocon paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Post

 

[Suzu]

I got the precise same reply - almost instantly. He probably had it prepared in advance.