Bessie, yep, it appears old Joe and Amy Leigh are pulling the old journalistic trick, attribute a quote to someone else, but it does reveal their position. I believe this is what we have here, why else would they print it? Okay, I can handle that. But what is frustrating about their coverage is that I feel 100% sure that either 1) they are sitting on some bombshell stuff that they are afraid to print, or either 2) they have not dug as deeply as this little cub reporter has into some of what is going on with this case. Maybe they were embarrassed about getting scooped by ATL on the web post, but seems to me that verifying the veracity of the Barbecue V-Card post should have been way up there on their priority list after the bond hearing . They read the same OPCHAN Sol posts we did , and had an article about it after we discussed it, if they saw the BBQ V-Card post in their original scrubbing of the OPCHAN site , they didn't say so either and it WAS NOT included in their original article.
Kinda partly just jumping off your post here, AgentFrank, but did first want to respond specifically to the part of your post I
bolded:
As frustrated as I've been with The Telegraph's lagging on the bond hearing post thing, I DO understand that, at the hearing and just after, they were probably pretty much in the same position some of us here were, saying, sheesh, never saw THAT one! But they probably figured, "there's gotta be some explanation -- otherwise, the DA would never be getting up there and reading this thing to the judge," once again, as a lot of us were thinking.
So they probably turned over all the possible explanations we raised here -- somehow we just missed that one, LE got to that one before we did, etc. For a while, their hands were kind of tied -- how to question the authenticity of the post when all they really had was that it wasn't familiar to them as one of SM's?
OK, quick enough, other folks -- WSers, macon.com commenters, folks at the site where SM posted -- started talking, scratching their heads, wondering, and putting together some pretty clarifying information. Telegraph maybe could have gotten creative at that point and jumped on that somehow, but still, I see that they still had a legitimate dilemma -- how to do without looking like a gossip rag.
Where I really lost patience with them was when the defense attorneys started commenting -- that's where, I think, they should have stepped in and gotten comments from the same attorneys and the district attorney, and carefully worked in whatever "sleuthing" they had been doing in the meantime. But instead, they ignored it, for all we could see, and, some say, even outright stated they had no plans to cover the issue. Truth is, I bet they have maybe been busy as bees with this thing, actually, in their heads -- but they missed the starting gun on this one.
Now on to a few related matters that have been nagging at my own thoughts:
Where I'm coming from, of course, is that the post was NOT written by SM. I'm convinced. I understand some others of you may not be, and I respect that. Whatever view you hold, though, maybe some of this will be relevant.
I've mostly gone with the view that quoting that post must have been a trickily-worded courtroom maneuver that would fly, but just barely, at a bond hearing.
In this view, I've thought maybe DA did for public/media impact, handy "summary" of one theory of the case, etc., with no plans to ever reference that post (and maybe any of SM's posts) again. I've thought maybe getting "caught" at it so quickly was not expected. I've wondered whether, if the post was never referenced again (say, at a trial), would there even be any recourse for the defense to challenge it. I still wonder about that, actually. Telegraph article at
http://www.macon.com/2012/05/18/2030514/hearing-set-for-mcdaniels-bond.html#disqus_thread
makes it sound somewhat as though something like that might happen at the next hearing, but if you read closely, it sounds kind of like they're just guessing, or even shakier, just using that "possibility" to tie in their belated nod to the post dispute to what news they did actually have to report, the upcoming bond reconsideration hearing.
Here's another media report from Monday, and it doesn't sound like Hogue is making any promises about the post playing a part on June 19:
Hearing Set For McDaniel's Bond Reconsideration
... McDaniel's attorney, Franklin Hogue stated, "We will argue for a lower dollar amount, show the judge evidence of no danger to McDaniel's siblings, and offer the 'plan' for supervision while McDaniel is out on bond..." ...
more at:
http://www.41nbc.com/news/local-news/12502-hearing-set-for-mcdaniels-bond-reconsideration
Maybe it will be challenged then, just don't know, I'm not a lawyer.
Sometimes though -- I turn my thinking to whether this possibly could have been an actual mistake? Could it be that the prosecution really thought that was a real SM post when it wasn't? The Telegraph article states:
Experts are examining the Internet posting that prosecutors allege McDaniel authored under the screen name “SoL,” short for “Son of Liberty,” a source familiar with investigation said Friday.
http://www.macon.com/2012/05/18/2030514/hearing-set-for-mcdaniels-bond.html#disqus_thread
The word "investigation" sure would seem to imply that their info is coming from someone at least loosely connected with the prosecution side. So, are they backtracking now? What kind of "experts" are "examining" the post? I sure hope they are examining something besides the post -- in other words, that they are doing all those sophisticated computer and internet forensics that I understand next to nothing about -- because I don't think examining the post alone is going to get them very far.
One thing that has crossed my mind several times during all this -- I never mentioned it before because it just seems TOO simple -- but just throwing it out there: Back when we were reading the SoL posts, that dating system they use over at the other site tripped me up time and time again. I'm just not cosmopolitan enough to deal with much other than month/day/year, it seems. And that's not what that site uses. Could THAT have caused confusion enough to someone at some point to bring all this about? Could whoever was combing the posts have found that one, posted by another "SoL"
after SM was in jail (because that is what I believe is the case) but somehow cataloged it under the wrong date?
Seeing that Wondergirl stopped in earlier gave me a thought: I wonder if any of the posters who were regulars on this thread at the time the SoL posts were being sleuthed but later slipped away
might just by chance have kept reading at "the other site" (as I know some of us did) and screenshotted or otherwise documented that post made by someone else (again, going on what I am assuming has happened, your opinion may vary, I realize!). I just feel that a good many of us probably READ it, saw it for what it was, and saw no reason to save it. Boy -- hindsight!!
