Cheney Slip Sends Surfers to Wrong Site

1 hour, 25 minutes ago

By EMILY FREDRIX, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - All he wanted were the facts. But Dick Cheney (news - web sites) ended up generating confusion_ and lots of it.


AP Photo

 

A slip of the tongue by the vice president during Tuesday night's debate with Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites) led Web surfers to a site run by George Soros, a billionaire who makes no secret of his opposition to the Bush administration.


In answering a question about his involvement with Halliburton, Cheney meant to direct people to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania. He urged people watching the debate to go to the site for facts countering Edwards' statements about the corporation Cheney used to run.


But Cheney cited FactCheck.com, a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands.


The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits — about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.


"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.


They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.


Web site operators typically pay fees to the companies that host their sites. The more hits a site receives, the more its operator pays.


Soros was not advised of the switch and did not know it had taken place until Wednesday, said a spokesman, Jeremy Ben-Ami.


___


On the Net:


: www.factcheck.com


Annenberg Political Fact Check: www.factcheck.org

Seems like he would have done better to not plug factcheck at all:

www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=272

Summary Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted "for the war" and "to commit the troops, to send them to war." He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry's proposals. Edwards  falsely claimed the administration "lobbied the Congress" to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.