Posted on 10/05/2006 8:07:17 AM PDT by truthandlife
William Kerr knew he was on to the biggest story of his life. But he didn’t know it was in his own back yard.
Kerr, of Moore, is the author of the blog Passionate America, which is being credited with discovering the identity of the former House page who may have exchanged inappropriate instant messages with former Rep. Mark Foley, and that the former page now works for Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate Ernest Istook.
Kerr said he received e-mails and phone calls from national media outlets Wednesday, including the tabloid television program Inside Edition and Internet pundit Matt Drudge.
“I started thinking, ‘I’m not big enough to put this story out,’” Kerr said. “In the four days that we really worked on this, we just said to each other, ‘Do you know how big this is?’”
Kerr said he stumbled onto the former page’s AOL screen name when looking at transcripts of the instant messages on ABC’s Web site Saturday.
He said he typed a slightly-different Web address into his browser and found a version of the transcript with the screen name.
Kerr and another blogger spent several days researching on the Internet.
They had determined the page’s identity and were about to publish it when they found out he worked for Istook.
Kerr said he accidentally posted the story before he intended. Although he removed the post, the information already had spread.
He tried to verify the former page’s identity through Istook’s campaign office, but was turned away.
Is this case one of "fake but accurate?" Obviously, ABC knew that the page was not 16, yet published reports that he was.
I wonder if Kerr knows everything that we know about this young man. Someone should invite him to FreeRepublic.
Interesting tidbit from the article:
. . . . Edmund had an Internet page on the popular MySpace Web site.
On that Web page, he identified himself as being 21 years old and said he had been attending college at the University of California, Berkeley. He also identified himself as a House page from September 2001 to June 2002. He would have been 16 and 17 then. He said he was going to Oklahoma to be deputy campaign manager for Istook’s gubernatorial effort, according to the Web site. . . . .
So much for the "he was 18!" argument.
Doesn't ABC need to be held accountable at some point? They need to issue a major correction.
The old Dan Rather, "even thought the document is fraudulent, I stick by the content" bullshit.
The IMs were from the time when he was still a page and 16 or 17 yrs old?
CobaltBlue: You cannot make that determination from the article. I thought these IMs were from 2003(Which is 3 years ago as being reported) not 2001 or 2002.
It was my understanding that although he was 16 & 17 when he was a page in D.C. - the I.M's didn't start until AFTER he had left and would have been 18 and older. But I may not have this all straight.. (no pun intended)
"So much for the "he was 18!" argument."
From all that I have read the dirty IM's started in 2003 AFTER he had left being a page. Therefore he would have been going on 18 or 18 at that time.
The IMs were from 2003 and the emails later that that. Your reasoning is off.
What did ABC know and when did they know it? To put all these IM's up on a web site and either state or imply that the young man corresponding with Foley was underage is a deliberate effort to manipulate the public.
I read the IMs were time stamped April 2003......
Can anyone in Oklahoma tell me if this is big news there? I called my folks last night to tell them to keep watch on this. Just curious if it is actually on the radio/news. Is this from the channel 9 TV station or a web page?
Um, the correspondence was from 2003.
I'm trying not to but I keep getting sucked in -- no pun intended. There's more than one page, it appears, one from Louisiana and one from California, and they're different ages.
Probably more than two but those are the ones that are being talked about right now.
That is correct and his 18th birthday was 2/23/03. He was 18. He's also lawyered up with McVeigh's defense attorney.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/browse
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