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Turkewitz White House Law Blogger Announcement Has Legs Despite Mediocre Use of Photoshop
Yesterday, Eric Turkewitz, whose New York
Personal Injury Blog is part of the Law.com Blog Network, made a
pretty huge announcement. Namely, that he had been
tapped as the first official White House law blogger.
The
"news" spread like wildfire. It was "picked up" by, among others, Above the
Law and The New York Times. The Volokh Conspiracy even
purported to have confirmed
the appointment through its own sources. Scott Greenfield at Simple
Justice put
up a post in which he admitted to being jealous, and had some
pretty harsh words to say about Turkewitz (and I thought he
hated me best!). Popehat had a nice
rant too.
Then, the WSJ Law Blog, with direct attribution to a
White House spokesman who refuted the story, declared the announcement
an April
Fools' Joke. And the Times removed
its initial reference to the news from its City Room Blog, where it
had appeared, with a note that "[b]logospheric chatter" (is
there an ointment for that?) indicated that the Gray Lady had indeed
been punked.
But, it was still April 1. Sooooooo, Turkewitz posted
a denial
of the denial. Seriously? I won't even attempt to catalog all of
the blog backing and forthing about this story, but I will show you the
following.
Photo of Turkewitz from his "30 second meeting with
Obama during the interview process," as included with his initial post
about the appointment:
And this photo, of the President with George
Mitchell, Special Middle East Peace Envoy, available here
on the State Department Web site:
So, congratulations to Turkewitz on an April
Fools' joke that was pretty well executed despite a clue as to the made-up nature
of the story that should have been easy enough to run down. As today
progresses, it should be fun to find out who was in on the joke, and who
was suckered.
Posted by Eric Lipman on April 2, 2010 at 01:21 PM | Permalink
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