PressEthic

Congressman Tom Foley co-chaired a caucus for exploited children... and apparently used an Internet chat to ask an underage male page to measure himself, among other sexually explicit conversations.

So how did he get caught?

Slowly.

The Washington Post reports:

In his letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Hastert (R-Ill.) acknowledged that some of Foley's most sexually explicit instant messages were sent to former House pages in 2003. That was two years before lawmakers say they learned of a more ambiguous 2005 e-mail that led only to a quiet warning to Foley to leave pages alone.

Foley, 52, abruptly resigned Friday, and Democrats have since been hammering Hastert and other GOP leaders. They have accused Republicans of covering up the matter and allowing Foley to remain as co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus instead of launching an inquiry and possibly uncovering the raunchier communications.

ABC News broke the story, but it seems that at least one news organization knew about elements of it over a year ago. The St. Petersburg Times published this story right after ABC ran its piece:

The boy served as a page to a Louisiana congressman last year and came to know Foley, 52. He sent the congressman a thank-you note when his term as a page ended. After the boy returned to his home in Louisiana, Foley used his personal e-mail account to correspond with the teen.

In the exchange, Foley asked the boy about weathering Hurricane Katrina and wrote, "send me an e-mail pic of you." In another e-mail, Foley told the boy he was on a break from Congress and was in Florida. He asked the boy, "how old are you now?"

The boy forwarded excerpts from the e-mails to congressional staffers and said, "Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously. This freaked me out."

The boy, who is not being identified because of his age, told the St. Petersburg Times in an interview last November, when the Times first learned of the e-mails, that he cut off correspondence with Foley.

"I thought it was very inappropriate," the boy told the Times. "After the one about the picture, I decided to stop e-mailing him back."

But the boy said he was not seeking publicity. "I don't want to get involved in any big thing," he said.

The e-mails have been circulating since they were posted on an anonymous blog on Sunday. An ABC News Web site posted an item about them Thursday afternoon and was the first to report that the Mahoney campaign was calling for an investigation.

This raises two questions:

1) Why didn't the St. Petersburg Times run with the story sooner.

2) Who runs that anonymous blog?

The Times' editors try to answer the first question here.

In November of last year, we were given copies of an email exchange Foley had with a former page from Louisiana. Other news organizations later got them,too. The conversation in those emails was friendly chit-chat. Foley asked the boy about how he had come through Hurricane Katrina and about the boy's upcoming birthday. In one of those emails, Foley casually asked the teen to send him a "pic" of himself. Also among those emails was the page's exchange with a congressional staffer in the office of Rep. Alexander, who had been the teen's sponsor in the page program. The teen shared his exchange he'd had with Foley and asked the staffer if she thought Foley was out of bounds.

There was nothing overtly sexual in the emails, but we assigned two reporters to find out more. We found the Louisiana page and talked with him. He told us Foley's request for a photo made him uncomfortable so he never responded, but both he and his parents made clear we could not use his name if we wrote a story. We also found another page who was willing to go on the record, but his experience with Foley was different. He said Foley did send a few emails but never said anything in them that he found inappropriate. We tried to find other pages but had no luck. We spoke with Rep. Alexander, who said the boy's family didn't want it pursued, and Foley, who insisted he was merely trying to be friendly and never wanted to make the page uncomfortable.

So, what we had was a set of emails between Foley and a teenager, who wouldn't go on the record about how those emails made him feel. As we said in today's paper, our policy is that we don't make accusations against people using unnamed sources. And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing.

The second question -- who runs the anonymous blog that posted the conversations and prompted ABC News to break the story -- is the subject of much blogospheric debate.

Tom Maguire writes:

Apparently the Mark Foley story first broke on this new blog, StopSexPredartors.blogspot.com, which started in July and brought down the Congressional leadership with its sixth, seventh and eighth posts.

Color me skeptical. Maybe the blog author was an unwitting catspaw, but I would want some assurance that this was not simply a successful attempt to promote a story that wasn't quite ready for the Mainstream Media by laundering it through some blogs (and wasn't that Matt Drudge's ecological niche, back in the day?).

Clarice Feldman writes:

In July a blog appeared, designed it said to trace sex predators. Few posts were made in that month or the following month. All recounted years old stories. Then on September 18, the blog printed the fairly innocuous email exchange between Congressman Foley and an unnamed page.In this correspondence initiated by the former page, Foley asks the former page how he is after Katrina (the boy lived in Louisiana) and asked for a photo. Thus began the latest political kerfuffle which swirls through the final five weeks of the campaign. How likely is it that this site with virtually no readership , few posts and hardly any history or posts of interest suddenly receives this bombshell? I’d say slight. About as likely as Lucy Ramirez handing Burkett Bush’s TANG papers.

Meanwhile Blog P.I. is doing some investigative work: Yesterday morning, I sent a message to stopsexpredators@gmail.com asking whether they could dissuade me from my own suspicion that the site was created in late July with the intent of eventually releasing the Foley e-mails. Needless to say, I haven’t received a response.

What I find interesting — baffling, really — is this: Why did the blog’s creator(s) even bother with the unpersuasive posting history? Why fake it if you can’t be convincing? As we’re seeing, it didn’t take very long for questions to arise about the source of this information. This hack job only makes it more likely it came from an interested DC group rather than, say, the pages who received them in the first place. If SSP’s author had merely posted them to a brand new Blogspot page without the shoddy posting history, the Foley e-mails might’ve been taken more seriously. At least the situation doesn’t lack for irony: The facts reported by the blog appear to be legitimate, while the blog itself appears to not be. Is this a new variation on that storied phrase, “fake but accurate”?

If so, this seems to be a story with a happy ending -- the Congressman has resigned and an investigation into whether a Catholic Churchesque coverup went on is set to proceed.

But larger questions loom: how should newspapers treat information on anonymous blogs? Does it even matter if the blog was covertly started by Foley's political opponents? What's a newspaper to do if it suspects someone who works with kids of sexually explicit misconduct, but none of the kids will go on the record? Are anonymous blogs another tool campaigns will use to attack one another in the future?