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By Root 810 0

search or browses the properly biased sites. In the journalism world, there is a term for these sorts of cobbled-together narratives, which pluck anecdotes from the reporting of others in an attempt to prove a case: the “clip job.” But of course that term harkens back to an era when the previous reporting had to be clipped out of physical publications, so the reporter would at least have been exposed to the context around each clipping—would have gotten, for example, a sense for how much time had elapsed between the instances. Today, clip jobs are accomplished with no clipping at all, but rather with directed searches on Nexis or Google, which present an instant, atemporalized buffet of anecdotes to fatten up whatever trend the journalist desires to see. And this is exactly the sort of “journalism” being plied by our entire nation of pundits today, from the lowliest blog all the way up to the TV anchor desk. With the Long Tail of Truth, telling ourselves new stories about ourselves has never been easier: abundant, cheap distribution of facts means an abundant, cheap, and unlimited variety of narratives, on demand, all the time.

OPPODEPOT PHASE TWO

This was precisely the use I had seen for OppoDepot: it would make the Long Tail of Truth even easier. Imagine the hypothetical reporter or blogger who decides he wants to tar a presidential candidate with a particular line of argument—as a coward, perhaps, or a fibber, or a peacenik. The writer could run a Google search with some relevant terms (“barack obama” liar) or read articles on the candidate from a sympathetic blog, and thereby maybe get the ammunition he needed: three (in the general rule) anecdotes about the candidates—i.e., nanostories—necessary to define a trend, QED. But OppoDepot would render all this searching and synthesis unnecessary. The blogger could simply visit the candidate’s OppoDepot page and find precisely the nanostories he needed; such, at least, was the dream.

Why, then, had the site not taken off as expected? The problem, it occurred to me, might very well be the lack of partisanship on the OppoDepot site. As Adamic and Glance had demonstrated, Internet readers were accustomed to partisan echo chambers, and so they distrusted sites that played both sides. A few e-mailers to OppoDepot had made roughly this same point but in less scientific terms; “Wow, this site is so unbiased,” one Ron Paul supporter had written, “I want to shit on it.” I began to toy with a new hypothesis: that a political discourse so riven into rival camps might never embrace a bipartisan OppoDepot.

In order to test this notion, I developed a second phase of the experiment. First, I took out an advertising account with Google so I could buy some smear search terms: “fred thompson lazy,” “obama muslim,” “hunter bribery,” and scores more as well, making specific references to the nanostories around each of the candidates. Second, for the keywords about each candidate, I wrote up an ad that the Google searcher would see, inviting him or her to come see more dirt, e.g.:

Better Dead Than Fred The truth about Fred Thompson, at Web 2.0’s oppo research homepage—www.oppodepot.com

Dennis = Menace Get the truth about Kucinich at Web 2.0’s oppo research homepage—www.oppodepot.com

Third, I plotted out a schedule. For two weeks OppoDepot would continue to slur candidates of both parties. But for the two weeks after that, it would sully only Republican candidates; and for the two weeks after that, it would malign only Democratic candidates. During these partisan phases, I would run only the Google ads about the relevant candidates, and would double the overall ad buy in order not to skew the results.

Once the ads began to run, the traffic for the site steadily grew, and tips began to pour in. On Rudy Giuliani: Retains on payroll a priest accused of child rape. On Christopher Dodd: Back in the 1990’s he and Ted Kennedy were accused of grabbing and “sandwhiching” a D.C. waitress between them at a bar. On Dennis Kucinich: During this last election in 2004 . . . on one side of his