I was a little surprised by the Harpers article that implied a widespread knowledge in the media community about the initial Foley Emails, the ones apparently leaked from Rodney Alexander’s office. I was curious about TalkingPointsMemo and the AMERICAblog particularly. John Aravosis of AMERICAblog responded that he had seen them, but they were passed on to the F.B.I. by his source soon after he saw them. And he did write about having seen them in his blog of September 29th, shortly after the story broke:
GOP House page board chair may have helped cover-up Foley scandal: … So the Republicans are telling us that they never heard anything else about Foley in all the time he was in Congress. Very interesting. Because I certainly heard some rumors about Foley over the years, and when I got a copy of these emails several months ago, the rumors were not inconsistent. But to House Republicans, family value Republicans, this story wasn’t important enough to even go beyond asking the perpetrator if he was really guilty.
I haven’t heard back from Josh Marshall at TPM, but the Harpers article was updated to note that he never saw the Emails themselves.
But I’ll hold my point that it is still really hard for people to report such things, even if they are on the other side of the political fence. I don’t know if it has always been this way, but people are hypersensitive to accusations of being part of a "smear campaign," unless they’re people like Rush Limbaugh who live in the world where smearing is just business as usual.
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