Blog Sleuth Hipper
Wednesday, November 5th, 2003We interrupt our blogging for this announcement: You just can’t miss this fantastic bit of blogging detective work on the “HipperCritical” blog. Some lawyer was allowed onto the New York Time’s Op-Ed pages yesterday with an editorial arguing that Iraq should be required to pay its international debt in full. Turns out (but the NYT didn’t bother to provide any clue about this) that he’s a lawyer whose clients are those companies and kingdoms to whom Iraq owes that money. Our sleuth “Hipper” took to the Google trail and found that out, plus a whole lot of other juicy information – such as that the lawyer is on record in the past as urging the forgiving of Russia’s foreign debt. (But Russia was the one paying his fees then, you see. That was then; this is now.)
It’s a textbook case of the power of weblogs-as-(media)-watchdogs. I’ve already e-mailed that page to editorial@nytimes.com, with a suggestion that perhaps a (belated) indication of that lawyer’s paid position to its readers might be appropriate.
