The party affiliation that dare not speak its name: AP reports out Abramoff sentence without ever mentioning that Abramoff is a Republican. Actually, without ever using the word ‘Republican’ in the story. At least not in this version at the ABC website.

Oh and there’s more.

Looks like Kaloogian’s partner at “Moving America Forward” thought the ‘Truth Tour’ trip to Iraq to report on all the good news would also be a good opportunity to sign a few lucrative contracts.

Okay, enough is enough.

I’ve been blogging for almost five and a half years. But being an ‘editor’ of another blog — TPMmuckraker.com — has given me a new perspective on the form and its relationship to the mainstream media. Specifically, it’s opened my eyes to just how routinely mainstream media outlets rip off stories that are originally reported on blogs.

We’re not the only ones. Rawstory.com has had related problems. But let me tell you our story.

Last week, over a three or four day period, there were four instances in which a mainstream media outlet took a story or scoop we (and by this I mean the two reporters who put out TPMmuckraker.com, Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) had first published and ran it as their own without crediting or mentioning that TPMmuckraker.com had originally broken the story.

Writing up or following up on a story and not crediting the news organiztion that first reported it is not a journalistic felony. It’s more on the order of a misdemeanor or moving violation. But it is a breach. And mainstream news outlets, a few of which I’ve actually written for, don’t seem to think it applies to blogs that are doing original reporting.

This evening I noticed that a writer for the Associated Press, Sam Hananel, wrote a story on Rep. Jim Ryun’s (R-KS) questionable real estate purchase from the now-defunct U.S. Family Network, the nonprofit controlled by DeLay political advisor Ed Buckham and funded by clients of Jack Abramoff.

This is Paul Kiel’s story. He’s one of the two reporters for TPMmuckraker.com. He wrote about the purchase first late Monday afternoon. He followed up late Tuesday afternoon with another piece, based on interviews with DC area real estate appraisers, which suggested that Ryun got the house for as much as $100,000 less than its market valuation.

As the editor of the site I can tell you that the piece began with a tip. Kiel then reported the story. It was his story.

Yet, in Hananel’s piece there is no mention of Kiel’s work. Hananel’s piece reads as though he was the first reporter to pick up the story when in fact his story never would have been written unless Kiel had reported the story and come up with most of the key facts two days earlier.

Now, I’ve worked in the mainstream media. And not infrequently reporters will think they deserved a credit when they don’t get one. It happens. As long as it’s not particularly egregious, it often goes unmentioned. In some cases the editor from the original publication will put in a call expressing his or her displeasure. (I did this in the four other cases I mentioned above.) I don’t know Mr. Hananel. And I wouldn’t be making a point of this were it not for the fact that ripping off original reporting from blogs is clearly routine.

The fact that Kiel does his reporting and writing on a site that calls itself a ‘blog’ and orders its stories in reverse chronological order does not give Mr. Hananel the right to rip off Kiel’s work or to run a story first reported by another journalist without crediting that journalist for their work.

Conventional news outlets frequently chide blogs for not doing any original reporting but rather feeding off the original reporting of the mainstream media. In many cases, the criticism is merited. But if that is the criticism it behooves every mainstream media outlet to enforce their own standing policies and not allow reporters to rip off blog writers who are doing original reporting.

Boy, we’ve really got a live one on the line with this Kaloogian joker.

So let’s review. Over the course of the last forty-eight hours we learned that the photo Kaloogian posted of Baghdad — as evidence of how peaceful things are in Iraq — was actually a picture taken outside Istanbul. The picture was evidence, Kaloogian claimed, of how the pro-terror press is misleading the American public about how well things are going in Iraq. Called on his error, he told TPMmuckraker.com that it was just a simple mistake: “You’re being really picky on this stuff. It’s not that big a deal. It was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

So fair enough. Now all he has to do is go back and get one of peaceful pictures from Baghdad.

So this is what he came up with. And just to be clear, no, I’m not joking. This is his new picture.

See the contented, optimistic look on people’s faces? The signs of quickening commerce?

Okay, enough snark. I’m actually shocked that this is the best this guy could do. Look, Baghdad is a vast city. There are people falling in love there. Children being born. The quiet desperation of existence. No one is saying or believes that there’s black smoke or an ambulance in every street scene. Certainly you can find some parts of the city where you can take photos and things look relatively normal.

What this joke of a picture — given what it’s supposed to demonstrate — tells me is that Kaloogian’s bogus fact-finding mission probably didn’t get outside the heavily fortified safe zones guarded by the US military. And that’s not surprising since even a lot reporters don’t venture beyond those areas much any more.

And the reason why isn’t that hard to fathom. Iraq isn’t a safe place for Westerners right now. It’s not a particularly safe place for Iraqis either. But that’s a separate issue. I think Howard Kaloogian knows that. And basically, like he was in a lot of his other recent gambits, he’s just trying to bamboozle and con people.

Was the Istanbul photo just an innocent accident? Maybe. But a campaign website isn’t like the FEC disclosure database. It’s a fairly small site. Given how big an issue this is for him I figure he’d probably be able to eyeball the part that flags his signature issue and accuses the media of supporting terrorism.

There are a lot of people dying in Iraq right now. There are a lot of American soldiers doing their best to do their job in Iraq and come back home alive. Kaloogian’s cheap tricks suggest he doesn’t care much about either. He just cheapens what everyone over there is going through.

By the way, for any of you who’ve spent time in Baghdad in the last few years. Do you recognize the part of the city where the picture in the post below was taken? Curious what section of the city it’s in.

Late Update: I figured the new picture was probably taken from the Green Zone and I started looked through Google Maps late last night to try to nail it down, but couldn’t figure out and went to sleep. A poster a Booman Tribune was a bit more resourceful and nailed it down.

Having very prominently complained just last night that a slew of mainstream media outlets were ripping off stories that Paul Kiel and Justin Rood broke at TPMmuckraker.com, I want to thank the Times’ John Broder for prominently and graciously crediting our role in yesterday’s Howard Kaloogian flameout. But let me practice what I preach. We were in the mix almost from the beginning. And I think we helped advance the story a lot by dissecting various obvious problems with the photograph, doing one of the first interviews with Kaloogian and others, etc. But the unraveling didn’t begin with us.

To the best of my knowledge it got rolling with this post by diarist ‘anthonyLA’ at Kos. And it was another Kos diarist, ‘jem6x’, who finally put the whole matter to rest by uncovering the other picture of the street corner outside Istanbul.

This is also a good opportunity to make a point related to my post yesterday about attribution. Often, it’s not that easy to disentangle or dissect just how a story got started on the web. Often they start ‘virally’, as was the case here. My point in flagging this issue yesterday wasn’t to ding other reporters for the occasional mistake. ‘Getting credit’ has never mattered much to me at TPM. And ‘credit’ is often very complicated in how stories get started on the web in any case. But the two reporters I hired at TPMmuckraker.com are doing a lot of wholly original reporting — stories that are theirs from the ground up, and ones a lot of work goes into. My point in pressing this issue last night wasn’t to hassle the occasional oversight or misunderstanding, both of which happen with some frequency between conventional news outlets. My point is to call out the assumption among too many reporters that original reporting on the web amounts to free pickings, a separate class of journalism they can snag and call their own. That’s gotta stop.

Rep. Ryun gets a great deal on a house. And the AP gets a great deal on a story. All that and more in today’s Daily Muck.

Jill Carroll’s release: These stories so often end in such darkness and brutality, it’s really nice to see this one end differently. Good for her; good for her family. Just good.

We’ve got the disclosure filings on Howard Kaloogian’s astroturf outfit ‘Move America Forward.’

Ahhh, the wages of bamboozlement.

For the last twenty-four hours or so, Howard Kaloogian’s campaign website has been in what looked to be a cyber death rattle. Now up, now down, appearing sometimes whole or with chunks missing, it was hard to know what was happening with the Baghdad-bamboozling site.

Now they’ve got this announcement up on the front page …

We Appologize for the inconvience, but we are currently experiencing Extremly High bandwidth on this server, preventing the site from functioning at its full potental. Be assured we are working as fast as possible to get the site running at full force. You may however still view our CONTRIBUTIONS.

It’s tough when you become a national laughing stock for trying to fool people into thinking up is down and don’t even bother to come up with good phony evidence.

Life’s hard.