The Mark Foley affair is once again giving everyone a lesson in the importance of the Internet, and how it moves the story forward and makes it challenging to rewrite it backward: First, we note that Foley's official website has been taken down lickety-split, but has been saved in phantom form thanks to Google cache. Meanwhile, C-SPAN has pulled a nugget out of the archive, putting Foley's upbeat "Tribute To Pages" speech from 2002 front and center on the website (C-SPAN had apparently received quite a few requests for this footage from broadcast outlets, and apparently it's already made the rounds of the evening news shows). RealPlayer link here; doesn't he just seem so innocent and vulnerable, just waiting to be victimized by knowing, plotting pages, Matt Drudge?
Meanwhile, on "Reliable Sources" this week Salon's Joan Walsh noted how deftly ABC had used the Internet to advance the story by publishing the shocking emails and IMs:
They went with them in a quick way, which the Web lets you do. And then they saw that more people came forward, that there was a lot more evidence out there. And I think that was a completely defensible thing to do. The story came together, and Foley's career fell apart in a matter of hours. And that's because there was plenty of evidence.
Once again, an amazing example of the newsgathering potential of the web, and how a news outlet can serve as both a provider of information and a clearinghouse for incoming intel. All in a matter of days. Amazing. But, good thing Foley's website is no longer online!
Update: Add citizen journalism to the list as former pages collect on Facebook to swap Foley stories (""I WAS a house page, and Mark Foley totally weirded me out!").
Further update: It's also worth noting how different the story becomes now that there's more than just the New York Times out there jumping on it (because the New York Times doesn't appear to have jumped too hard).
Further update: Good grief, it doesn't stop - here's more from ABC on Foley stopping a house vote to have "internet sex" with a page. Gross.
