This post originally appeared at Teablogging.net.
On Sunday morning while you all were probably still in bed with your food stamps and your welfare and your goddam hippie granola, your intrepid Teablogging editor posted a link to a story about the arrest of Daniel Knight Hayden who had posted several tweets detailing his intent to incite a violent protest at the Oklahoma State Capitol during a tax protest tea party. The story didn’t get a huge amount of play across the blogosphere or in the media, but twitter user @TeresaKopec noted that Washington Times blogger Amanda Carpenter posted a story about Hayden today, and tweeted a comparison of Carpenter’s interpretation to this Wired story on the same topic.
Here’s a link to the original Amanda Carpenter post.
Here’s a link to the present incarnation of the article, which was updated around 9:30 PM EST.
Some fairly significant changes were made between the two drafts, not entirely coincidentally after a number of Twitter users, including Kopec, myself and @Shoq, confronted Carpenter about her blatant mischaracterization of Hayden’s intent:
“A 52-year-old Oklahoma City man was arrested on tax day for threatening to kill people attending a taxpayer tea party protest at the state Capitol.”
and the political bent of his MySpace page:
“Several political videos are posted on Mr. Hayden’s MySpace account, including one known as a “truther” documentary, accusing President Bush of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks.”
To read Capenter’s initial account, it seems as if Hayden is some sort of deranged liberal bent on the destruction of his conservative enemies. Which, as Kopec and others pointed out, is not even remotely true.
In the edit of her story, Carpenter concedes that Hayden’s MySpace also contained videos suggesting President Obama was “hypnotizing” his supporters, but she continued to push the narrative that a recently released DHS report on right-wing extremism (commissioned by the Bush administration and brother to the report on leftwing extremism, but never you mind about that) had unjustly targeted conservatives in general and teabaggers in particular, and she continued to ignore other posts with anti-gun-control messages, links to survival guides, and a lengthy excerpt of teabagger manifesto Atlas Shrugged. Ms. Carpenter wrote:
“Liberal bloggers quickly pointed to Mr. Hayden to validate the Obama administration’s report about the rise of right-wing extremism. Mr. Hayden’s online posting are obviously anti-government, although his political persuasions do not appear to be linked to any party.”
This is both misleading and partisan projection at its most obvious. Mr. Hayden garnered limited coverage generally, and his mentions among Carpenter’s bogey-man “liberal bloggers” particularly were, as of Carpenter’s posting, limited to a Huffington Post piece, a repost of HuffPo on AlterNet, a brief blurb at AMERICAblog, and a dailyKos post that never made it to the front page.
It’s also worth noting that as Carpenter’s story continued to, er, evolve, neither she nor her editors at the Washington Times made any note of the fact, and as of this writing, no correction or clarification has been issued.
All things considered, Daniel Hayden is probably more devoted to an anarchist or libertarian cause than anything, and his calls to violence clearly don’t represent any group or ideology, conservative or liberal, beyond the walls of his own disturbed mind.
But Hayden was never really the story here. Rather, this is an example of yet another conservative pundit blithely ignoring objective facts when the facts don’t back up the “cause.” Amanda Carpenter, in her initial draft, is happy to suggest that Hayden is an anti-Bush truther intent on killing hapless tea party attendees, when in fact he was hoping to incite the protesters to violence because he thought they weren’t going far enough.
Given that, and the general tenor of his messages, he’s probably just the kind of guy the Department of Homeland Security was hoping to pick up. But these facts didn’t toe the party line quite well enough for a loyal soldier like Amanda Carpenter. So she changed them. Journalism FTW!
As an aside, Amanda Carpenter has blocked me and at least two others from following her Twitter feed, allegedly because we were posting “obscene/pornographic” messages about her. Apparently we’re only good enough to be her factcheckers until we start asking that she acknowledge she had to be fact-checked. Oops.
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