{"id":173,"date":"2009-10-14T11:32:12","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T15:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/000af36.netsolhost.com\/wordpress1\/2009\/10\/14\/who-put-adam-nagourney-up-to-his-thinly-sourced-article\/"},"modified":"2009-10-14T11:32:12","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T15:32:12","slug":"who-put-adam-nagourney-up-to-his-thinly-sourced-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/2009\/10\/14\/who-put-adam-nagourney-up-to-his-thinly-sourced-article\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Put Adam Nagourney Up to His Thinly Sourced Article?"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney has an article<\/a> suggesting Virginia Democrats are regretting their choice of Creigh Deeds as their candidate for governor.  Nagourney\u2019s analysis of Deeds\u2019 poor campaign is accurate, but there are several problems with it.<\/p>\n

1.  It is thinly sourced.  The only<\/em>  source cited is Virginia political analyst Robert Holsworth.  Generally, Holsworth provides credible insight (though his blog<\/a> posts are written in a weird one sentence per paragraph style that disjoint his thinking), but no one else is cited in the article.<\/p>\n

2.  Maybe it is \u201chard not to forgive some Virginia Democrats for thinking that they might have been better off with Mr. McAuliffe at the top of the ticket,\u201d  but Nagourney offers no one, quoted anonymously or even referenced, to support his contention.<\/p>\n

3. Nagourney\u2019s conclusion \u2013 for with no sources that\u2019s all this article is \u2013 is ludicrous.  Whatever disabilities Deeds has -\u2013 and he is, at best, an ineffective, some might say bumbling, campaigner -\u2013 the idea that Terry McAuliffe, an abrasive interloper in the Commonwealth\u2019s politics, could draw more votes than Deeds isn\u2019t credible.  Would he excite Democrats more?  Yes, probably.  Would he have more money to spend?  Most definitely.  But would he get anything more than the most yellow dog Democrats outside of Northern Virginia to vote for him?  Absolutely not.  With Dems reminding everyone of their fecklessness on Capitol Hill and Obama appearing uncertain, weak and all hat and no cattle, the idea that McAuliffe could win the race is unsupported. Obama won Virginia.  Bill Clinton didn\u2019t.  With McAuliffe\u2019s ties to the Clintons, there is little chance he could win this year \u2013 or any year, really.<\/p>\n

So the question is, who put Nagourney up to this article?  In it, he states that McAuliffe himself and aides to Deeds and his opponent Bob McDonnell \u201cdid not respond to a request for comment.\u201d So what possessed the reporter to write this story?  Someone\u2019s pitch worked.  I doubt it was Holsworth, but whoever it was, they are still smoking \u2013 and inhaling \u2013 something.<\/p>\n

Cross posted on News Commonsense<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney has an article suggesting Virginia Democrats are regretting their choice of Creigh Deeds as their candidate for governor.  Nagourney\u2019s analysis of Deeds\u2019 poor campaign is accurate, but there are several problems with it. 1.  It is thinly sourced.  The only  source cited is Virginia political analyst Robert Holsworth.  Generally,… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91,92,37,93,94,95],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}