Hack roast: when citizens attack ... reporters.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns

ON NOVEMBER 30, 1999, Al Gore told a high school class in New Hampshire about how, 20 years earlier, a girl their age had informed his congressional office about toxic waste problems in her hometown of Toone, Tennessee. The resulting Capitol Hill hearings, which Gore sponsored, also investigated a much more famous polluted area of upstate New York called Love Canal. "Toone, Tennessee--that was the one that you didn't hear of," the then-vice president told the Granite State students. "But that was the one that started it all."

The next day, both The Washington Post and The New York Times changed the wording of that last quote, replacing "But that" with "I," making it seem as though Gore was trying to take credit for discovering the Love Canal disaster. Hours later, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson issued a press release blasting Gore for his "pattern of phoniness" while mutating the quote still further: "I was the one who started it all," the alleged remark now read.

Even though the Times and Post both ended up running corrections more than a week later (under duress from the outraged high schoolers), and several media critics eventually deconstructed the tale, the story of Al Gore "discovering" the Love Canal became a fixture in Campaign 200% to be repeated in several hundred newspapers and on every major news network in America.

In 2004 it's much harder to get away with such shaggy-dog reporting, thanks to a tidal wave of amateur online media criticism that has finally started to break into professional newsrooms. On January 4, for example, Associated Press reporter Nedra Pickler transformed a legitimate Howard Dean debate point ("I opposed the Iraq War; with the exception of Dennis [Kucinich] and Carol [Moseley Braun], everybody else supported it") into a lie: "I opposed the Iraq War when everybody else up here was for it. "The misquote was picked up by The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and dozens of other newspapers, but it was also flagged by several pro-Dean sites and the popular blog Daily Kos. Within a few days Pickler acknowledged the error, the AP ran a correction, and a potential urban legend about Dean's intemperate fabulism was strangled in the crib.

The 2000 and even 1996 presidential circuses were already pestered by online media critics and citizen dart blowers--the Gore-Love Canal story was dismantled in real time by D.C. comedian Bob Somerby, who edits the invaluable Daily Howler site but this...