BlogWatch: Hoax Column Still Circulating

Here at Dowd Central our crack team of DowdWatchers monitor the internet 24/7 for remarks about Maureen Dowd. If the NSA were as atuned to Al Qaeda as we are to Dowd, Bin Laden would be in Gitmo already.

About a week ago we started picking up chatter relating to the hoax July 29 column where Dowd supposedly claims that Barack Obama is getting anonymous donations from foreign nationals. Nevermind that it is McCain that has connections to shady foreign moneybags like the Rothschilds or Clinton Burkling buddy and Anne Hathaway humping con-man Raffaello Follieri. But I digress.

Ever vigilant of Dowd's precious reputation, when I see this smear emerge from the round-robin e-mail chains and difficult-to-register-for forums out into an actual blog, I try to leave a comment pointing out that it is an unsubstantiated hoax and they should do just a modicum of research before spreading such slander.

For example, Fr. Ryan Humphries of the Catholic Underground quickly removed the article forn his otherwise fascinating Tumblr page but took me to task for being so pompous. But even a more polite tone doesn’t always work. Desert Conservative prefaced a re-posting of the hoax with this:

Get ready, we will have a Muslim in the White House!!!
Or why would they send him so much money!!!
$200 million!!!

That blog then went on to highlight the more salacious and ridiculous claims. My rather respectful and polite comment never quite made it through moderation. Clearly, this blogger has no intention of correcting the record.

The hoax column is even working it’s way into the background of genuine news stories. A Chicago Tribune story about an out-of-date news story nearly bankrupting United Airlines included this line:

Just in recent days, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama had to debunk a spurious column falsely linked to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that raised questions about the source of Obama's campaign finances.

When the story ran, the spurious column had been debunked for over two months, not recent days, but that is neither here nor there. The point is that this shadow smear campaign continues and some people don’t care what the truth is.

Far more valuable are reactions like this from Dave Lindorf that when he got a pass-along e-mail had this reaction:

Now I could see before reading two paragraphs of the alleged column he forwarded to me that it was not Dowd's acerbic and witty writing style, but I cannot expect most people who don't even read Dowd to know that. Two minutes at the computer, however, and I was easily able to confirm, as anyone could do, that Dowd had never written the article.

He goes to explain what he thinks is really going on.

Why this particular campaign dirty trick--and with Karl Rove in the back seat of the McCain campaign bus I have no doubt that it originated in the bowels of that campaign, which has not disavowed it--works, and why the many other vile efforts, like the latest shameful official McCain TV ad claiming that Obama backs "sex education for kindergartners," work is that many otherwise decent Americans like my uncle first of all are primed to believe such crap by a deep-seated prejudice against people of color, and secondly that the corporate media which are supposed to be informing us are afraid to call out a mainstream political candidate for lying and deceiving the public.

I couldn’t agree more. The real problem is that so many people don’t bother to research of verify these scurrilous claims, particularly if they are spread under the false banner of Liberal Media Icon (sic) Maureen Dowd. Actually public appearances of this hoax are just the tip of the iceberg. I know from my traffic reports that this smear got a new breath of life just after the Republican convention. I have no idea by whom, but someone enjoys seeing this lie perpetuate and fester.

Please stop it if you can. Follow the example of the writer of the widowswalk blog who ran across some people that had been duped by the e-mail:

I talked with about 8 households, and left calling cards at the rest. Only one household was pro-McCain. Or perhaps the better description would be “anti-Obama.” My impression was there was a latent racism. The issue the two women had siezed upon was a hoax news column, purportedly written by Maureen Dowd, saying that Obama was getting $200M from “the Arabs” for his campaign. The article is a racist smear and a lie, of course. I printed out the Snopes refutation http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/donations.asp for them, and will probably mail it to them. Doubt it will change hearts and minds.

Doing so probably won’t change the minds of those already viscerally opposed to Obama, but at least it removes a rationalization from them and spreads the truth, a hard to find commodity in this election.

Dowd Hoax Update

I'm proud to have played even a small part in the exposing of a fake Maureen Dowd column that has been circulating around the internet for the past week or two. Eventually this grass roots whisper campaign against Obama in the name of Dowd has been exposed by the mainstream internet organizations.

The PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter is feature of the St. Petersburg Times that ran an excellent summary of the story and quoted yours truly copiously:

Dowd fans spot a fraud: Column had no movie references

Dowd fans were quick to see the column didn't have the writer's unique voice.

"As far as pastiches go, it makes no effort to imitate Dowd’s style in the least," wrote someone named Mo MoDo on The Dowd Report, a blog that tracks the columnist's work. "There are no silly puns, alliteration, movie references, or odd nicknames. It’s just pure unsubstantiated allegations of campaign fraud."

They even named me ahead of their interview with Dowd herself:

Dowd says she hadn't heard of the bogus column until we called her about it. She said she stopped looking herself up on the Internet years ago, after someone showed her a fake photograph of her having sex with Bill Clinton.

She's surprised people believed the column was real. "It’s hard to believe that anybody would give it any credibility as mine. It’s about money – something I know nothing about."

See, Dowd herself agrees with me that Krugman would have been the better choice.

The Huffington Post also got Maureen on the record denying it.

A comically absurd Barack Obama smear email is making the rounds right now involving a fabricated column by famed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. The email, presented as a June 29 op-ed (replete with The Times' font, layout, and Dowd byline)

Dowd herself found the email an exercise in absurdity, not to mention -- quite possibly -- the first time she's been indirectly involved in a smear campaign.

{snip}

"The line about it being the 'most shocking revelation,' I don't think I've ever said those words, except in a satire. Also, it is about money, which I never write about," she told the Huffington Post. "Sometime you try and protest things you hear about, but sometimes it's just not worth it... It is hard to track down and control these things, and anyone who reads my column knows that this wasn't me. I got to the second line and I knew it wasn't me."

Snarkmasters at Gawker also noted the rather sloppy imitation work.

Well, we gotta admit, the pretend rhetorical question is a kinda nice touch, there. But she's not calling him "O-Bambi" so it's obviously a phony. Also Maureen Dowd does not deal with money, numbers, or objective "facts."

Gawker also jump on Dowd's quote from the HuffPo article:

The best part of the whole thing is the real Dowd, on when she stumbled upon the email: "I got to the second line and I knew it wasn't me." The second line! She couldn't remember the lede from a column from last week?

Methinks Maureen is engaging in a little self-deprecating leg-pulling of her own.

Jossip states that anyone that fell for the hoax is a complete moron. And that the world is full of morons:

...thanks to the “comically absurd” (HuffPo’s words) email’s well-executed mock up of an actual Dowd column, complete with the Times‘ font and her byline, people on the receiving end of this email might actually believe it. And as HuffPo thought to do, clicking on over to the Times website to see if the column is for real isn’t an extra step most recipients would take

That’s why these smear email campaigns work..

Like spam, they’re very easy to fabricate and send, and even if a tiny percentage of recipients believe them — an herbal supplement really can increase my size by two inches? — they prove effective.

So while everyone playing a game of political inside baseball can wave their finger at the email and feel good about how they so easily flagged it as a fake, rest assured many Americans won’t.

And Jossip is dead right here. The phony column still appears even if it is quickly hooted down. Here is a heavily abridged transcript of a forum thread at RightNation.US:

USNRETWIFE (Jul 9 2008, 01:21 PM): More Obama financing subterfuge from our NWO friends from afar
{phony column snipped}

ilja (Jul 9 2008, 01:31 PM): Did Maureen Dowd really write this? Why is it not in the Times if she did? This is wild if it's true. I can't wait to hear more.

USNRETWIFE (Jul 9 2008, 01:40 PM): My mother sent it to me in an email. I searched it out as I didn't want to just post an email and I found it at the Vetern's Voice. I'd like to know more about this too.

catpat (Jul 9 2008, 01:44 PM): This is a hoax. I do not know how to do links so here are a couple url's: {links snipped}

USNRETWIFE (Jul 9 2008, 01:21 PM): Thank you.

And other bloggers are getting tired of it. Ed Cone (who seems like a pretty responsible pundit) called "Enough!":

Gentle readers: Please take the hooks out of your mouths and stop sending me the fake June 29 Maureen Dowd column purporting to reveal that Obama is being funded by the Chinese and other bogeymen.

The real Maureen Dowd is bad enough.

Since many of these people that have passed along this e-mail defend themselves with how "authentic" the e-mail looked, Ed Cone was nice enough to forward it to me it as it appeared. Here is a screen capture (click to embiggen):




An embedded NYT logo, Dowd's photo, and two links that don't actually go to the column being quoted are all it takes to dupe dozens and perhaps hundreds of gullible Obama haters. For future reference, this is what you see when you get forwarded a real column from the Times:

No pictures or logos, but lots of links and ads. Note that as of this morning, Dowd's column from Sunday (which was mostly transcribed relationship advice) is still in the Top 5 E-Mailed list. This may be why she is such a tempting target to spoofers.

Since I published my blogpost, I have been getting tons of traffic from Indy Conservative Hardball who had instantly retracted the hoax and replaced it with this:

It's great to see that a liberal columnist like Dowd has her groupies... or desk jockey's that have nothing better to do with their time but as to scan the Net for any mention of their "patron saint".

To my readers, I apologize for the posting...
To the guys at the Dowd report who had a post up defending Dowd within 27 MINUTES of my posting, thanks for the link. And thanks for the somewhat increased traffic.

No, THANK YOU. My traffic over the past few days has gone up by an order of magnitude. While much of it has come from ICH, an increasing percentage is from YahooMail accounts and similar tough to trace sources. My working theory is that as this hoax column continues to make the rounds of habitual e-mail forwarders, those in the know are replying back with refuting links, including mine.

These hoaxes circulate surreptitiously forever spreading half-truths and lies which people read and believe. The best disinfectant is the bright light of the truth, so please expose and rebut this malicious abuse of the name and reputation, such as it is, of Maureen Dowd.

BlogWatch: Hoax Dowd Column Making The Rounds

Updated 7/8/08, 8:50 AM PST (updated text in italics)

There is a hoax column out in the blogosphere purporting to be an expose by Maureen Dowd on Barack Obama’s internet fund raising. Several blogs have reprinted it in toto and it has also appeared on several random message boards. It starts with this:

OBAMA’S TROUBLING INTERNET FUND RAISING
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 29, 2008

Certainly the most interesting and potentially devastating phone call I have received during this election cycle came this week from one of the Obama’s campaign internet geeks. These are the staffers who devised Obama’s internet fund raising campaign which raised in the neighborhood of $200 million so far. That is more then twice the total funds raised by any candidate in history – and this was all from the internet campaign.

It then goes on to allegedly detail that the Obama campaign has been getting internet contributions from Middle Eastern and Chinese sources.

As far as pastiches go, it makes no effort to imitate Dowd’s style in the least. There are no silly puns, alliteration, movie references, or odd nicknames. It’s just pure unsubstantiated allegations of campaign fraud.

None of the blogs provide a direct link to the hoax column. If they have a link at all, it’s to the NYT Maureen Dowd main page which obviously doesn’t include this column. The date of the fake column would have been the day the 'It’s Over Lady!’ column was published which had nothing to do with Obama or campaign financing.

What has us at Dowd Central scratching our head is that if you want to plant phony accusations at Obama, why attach Maureen Dowd’s name to it? For a fake veneer of authenticity, it seems to be a puzzling choice. Krugman as the resident Clinton supporter and the far wonkier number cruncher would have been a more plausible target.

The earliest source I could find for the hoax column is a June 29 post on a reader blog at the Arizona Republic website. The writer is unaffiliated with the newspaper and has been getting a lot of commenter pushback. It has also been posted by a particularly scurrilous anti-Obama site that published it on July 3rd, but this phony column has probably been around before that. The blogs that have reprinted it usually put in one or two lines of introduction or commentary but make no attempt to even verify if such a column even exists.

Hypocricy Rules does identify it as a hoax. Another blog, Liberal Common Sense also calls “Bullshit!” in a post correctly if not succinctly titled 'Like Maureen Dowd would write anything anti-Obama':

If you needed proof that people will believe anything without doing any fact checking here is your evidence:

{fake column snipped}

Seriously people, there are enough reasons to not support him based on the truth that you should at least do your homework before posting crap like this on the internet, it's not that difficult to take a few seconds to verify that not only did Maureen Dowd not write this, but it's not true.

But the bloggers who are passing this around uncritically (Indy's Conservative Hardball has since retracted the post) and pasting it into the comments of places like Free Republic don’t care. They just love that a liberal bastion like Dowd is blasting Obama, whether she really did or not.

Sometimes a story is just too good to check and rumors circle the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

See this post for an update.