Web site flub shows Cheney could use fact checker
By Stephanie Schorow
Thursday, October 7, 2004
A slip of the tongue during Tuesday night's vice presidential debate sent viewers to a billionaire's anti-Bush site in a cyberspoof that rocked the Web.
Vice President Dick Cheney tried to direct viewers to the nonpartisan Web site FactCheck.org to counter statements by Sen. John Edwards [related, bio] about Cheney's Halliburton connections.
The site, launched in December by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, examines candidates' speeches and ads for falsehoods.
However, Cheney mistakenly called the site ``factcheck.com,'' which, by debate's end, was sending users to www.GeorgeSoros.com, a Bush-bashing site run by the Hungarian-born hedge-fund manager.
Blogs buzzed that Soros had made a brilliant - or nefarious - late-night deal to obtain the domain. A Soros spokesman denied any connection.
John Berryhill, a Philadelphia-based lawyer for Domain Names Sales Corp., which owns factcheck.com, confirmed Soros was not even notified. After hits on factcheck.com soared to 48,000 an hour, the frantic company redirected traffic to Soros' site, rather than shut down or link to a partisan campaign, charity or ``anyone asking for money,'' he said.
Despite the mixup, FactCheck.org crashed frequently from the traffic overload. Ironically, the site wrote subscribers in an e-mail, ``Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co.,'' although the site's analysis of the debate concluded both ``Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts.''
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