The Web on the Candidates

He got it wrong: Yesterday morning, Ben Smith of the Politico reported that John Edwards was suspending his campaign due to his wife Elizabeth's recurrence of cancer. As we know now, Edwards is staying in. Smith's source got it wrong, and Smith wrote a good piece describing how he got the story and the differences between reporting for a newspaper and for a blog. "Though I’ve spent the last several years at major newspapers – the New York Observer and the New York Daily News most recently – I’ve done much of my reporting on blogs, and have developed an instinct to let my readers know whatever I know, as soon as I know it... But the scale of this story was simply too big to report that way, to share information with high but imperfect confidence – and without making that level of confidence crystal clear. I should have waited for a second source, or hedged the item much more fully. Or simply waited for the news conference like everybody else." Hat tip to Smith for owning up to his error so quickly and openly. Very bloggy of him.

Eric Kleefeld at TPMCafe writes that a new Zogby Interactive poll finds that the "Vote Different" anti-Hillary video had no effect on two-thirds of of likely Democratic voters, and "the remaining one third were three times as likely to prefer Clinton after seeing it."