April 4, 2007

Left Wing Bloggers get punked, big time

Posted by LSU @ 11:20 pm

One of the complaints from the right to the left is the left's Bush/Rove Derangement Syndrome that encourages the left to take anything they can and apply and try and use it to insinuate that Bush and Rove are the Spawn of Satan.  The lefties dismiss it as partisan bloggers protecting their holy patrons or some junk.

My beef with it is that it removes reason and logic and allows emotion to supplant any hint of truth.

Here is case in point.  From Michelle Malkin Via Sister Toldjah:

Take a close look at this photo–focus on the folder tucked under Karl Rove's arm and keep a mental note of what's on the TV monitor (big hat tips to Gid and Ace):

Now, look at all the heavy breathing from left-wing blogs about the name on the folder, "Coptix:"

Daily Kos
Guerilla Women TN
Wonkette

The lefty bloggers ran wild with assertions and speculations that Coptix, a Chattanooga Internet firm, was serving as some sort of nongovernment back-door e-mail administration for White House correspondence.

It went positively Viral.

Only guess what?

The photo was an April Fools' weekend prank. And the Rove Derangement Syndrome crowd fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported today:

A Chattanooga Internet firm doctored a photo of White House aide Karl Rove to show him holding a folder with the company's logo, fueling speculation in the blogosphere that the president's top adviser is running White House correspondence through a nongovernment e-mail system.

"It's easy for people to plant disinformation and misinformation out there," said Josiah Roe, executive vice president of Coptix, based in St. Elmo.

Mr. Roe said the company altered the photo and placed it on the Internet after bloggers implied that Coptix was involved in a "vast right-wing conspiracy" because the company — along with another local firm, SmarTech — provides an Internet service for the Republican National Committee.

Coptix president Josiah Roe explained further:

Somehow, nobody noticed that the story happened to break on the weekend of April Fool's Day.

Yes, it's true: it's not true. We used Photoshop to superimpose the name of our company and a folder under Rove's arm, and asked a local "right winger" to plant it on his blog.

The timing could not have been more perfect, especially given the atmosphere of suspicion that Rove & Co. are doing business via e-mail that is hosted at Chattanooga's Smartech/Airnet Group, rather than federal servers. Coptix, our company, provides backup DNS hosting for Smartech/Airnet. So when any well-meaning muckraker runs a search for domain names such as "gwb43.com" or "georgewbush.com," the nameservers listed for those domain names will include the Smartech server and a Coptix server.

DNS hosting does not involve user accounts or storage, in fact, Coptix has no contact whatsoever with the RNC or anyone in the current president's administration. DNS is simply the basic routing of Internet traffic. In fact, it's one of the most basic technologies that govern the Internet.

Since we have no knowledge of the content on these servers — and since Coptix has employees and customers of all political stripes — we were surprised that at the end of last week we noticed a good deal of blogger buzz going on around these domain names. Not to mention that this buzz included questions such as "Who is Smartech?," "Who is Coptix?" and "Are they part of a vast right-wing conspiracy?"

So we decided to run an experiment…

Since it was April Fool's weekend, in the tradition of George Plimpton and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), we decided to have some fun. We asked one of our Web designers, Ron Ott, to put our name on a photograph that had originally been posted on a local blogger's diary (with his permission, of course). Thank you Adobe, 15 minutes later Coptix's name was emblazoned on a folder.

…Note that we even put in a giveaway that the photo was a fake. The television in the top right corner is showing fantastical creatures from the 1974 television series "Land of the Lost."

So how viral?  How deranged?  Check out the list of sites that featured it and their Post Slugs, via http://coptix.com/rove/:

Where it First Appeared

Blogs Where it Was Posted