Friday, November 16, 2012

Politico's Chief White House correspondent Mike Allen leaked Washington Post articles to Raw Story when he worked at Time

Update at bottom: Excerpts from bogus lawsuit regarding Allen's leaks to RAW STORY, which redacted his name

Last fall, I tweeted that Mike Allen, the chief White House correspondent for Politico, leaked Washington Post articles to RAW STORY, while he was working for Time Magazine.

Even though Mike Allen is one of America's most famous journalists, and has done many exclusive interviews with politicians such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, not one blogger or media organization reported on my tweets.

One of my tweets from November of 2011 - which convicted hacker Adrian Lamo claims may have resulted in a $500,000 judgment against me over the summer, even though I was never told about it - was "thanks @mikeallen for helping us scoop @washingtonpost on their own reporting."

I haven't heard from RAW STORY or any of its lawyers since February, when the judge ruled against them, initially. So I have no clue if they really obtained a default judgment against me for $500,000 without even sending me an email. And I fail to see how they can show cause that they lost even a nickel for tweets that no one in the media ever reported on.

(Editor's Note: RAW STORY publisher Roxanne Cooper broke the NDA first in the summer of 2011, when she spread lies about me at a Netroots convention to notorious cyber-bully Neal Rauhauser. At at hateful blog called "Breitbart Unmasked", Matt Osborne repeated these smears in an article bashing me. In 2012, I was also wrongfully sued for being in a conspiracy with Rauhauser and convicted bomber, Brett Kimberlin. The "evidence" tying me to Kimberlin was his alleged links to RAW STORY. Rauhauser bragged that he played a role in the RAW STORY lawsuit, and he has threatened me and harassed me, trying to get my address, so that he can make false complaints to the police about me. Since Rauhauser has a relationship with RAW STORY, I refused to share my address with them, after I had moved to another city. In truth, the main reason why RAW STORY sued me was because they didn't want me to probe their ties to Kimberlin, but I had to since I was being smeared over it, and falsely accused of crimes related to the convicted bomber.)

I'm a reporter and my main focus has always been on propaganda and media criticism, even before I was hired by RAW STORY in 2005, and was promoted to Managing Editor and then Executive Editor from January of 2007 to October of 2010.

Earlier today, ABC News reporter Jason Ryan thanked me for notifying them about key information they left out of an article related to - an ongoing story that some are calling - PetraeusGate. "Petraeus Affair: Shirtless FBI Pic Appears to Be Playful" now includes the fact that "Youssef Megahed was acquitted by a jury in 2009," which "Veteran FBI Agent Frederick Humphries Got Ball Rolling on Petraeus Probe" failed to note.

Also, Daily Dot's Kevin Morris credited me for tipping him on a story he published today: "Gen. John Allen didn't troll Jill Kelley on Wikipedia."

In October of 2005, I wrote an article called "Does the New York Times Have a Learning Disability?" which ran at New York University Professor Jay Rosen's highly regarded media criticism blog Press Think. The subtitle was "Why-the-heck-is-it that after six years, at least four major controversies, and two we’re-gonna-fix-it committees--each coughing up its lessons--the editors of The New York Times haven’t seemed to learn a blasted thing?"

Here are some of my tweets from May of 2012:



Excerpts from bogus lawsuit regarding Allen's leaks to RAW STORY, which redacted his name

RAW STORY founder John Byrne wrote that he sent me an email which "discussed a confidential source relationship with an individual who provided us with information about upcoming news items to be published by the Washington Post Company and its family of sites."

"This information allowed Raw Story to plan its own coverage of news items in light of its coverage by other news organizations, which, in turn, helped us find ways of making our own stories distinct or connect to the items slated to appear elsewhere," Byrne added, which is not entirely true, since the majority of Raw Story articles based on Mike Allen's tips, especially those not written by me, contained nothing but Washington Post excerpts.

Byrne added, "According, our relationship to this reporter as a source of information informed our coverage and what news topics we emphasized, which in online media has a direct relationship to visitor traffic and thus also revenue from advertising. At present, this source is a correspondent at a Washington, D.C.-focused publication."

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