KOS CORRECTION… After we put up an online link yesterday to a profile I wrote of the blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, Moulitsas put up a pair of posts on his blog saying he’d found some errors in the piece. I spent much of today reconnecting with sources to seek clarification and looking back through my notes, and would like to make several corrections. The corrections will also appear in the Monthly’s next print issue, and will be made in the online version of the story. All errors are mine.
My piece quoted a staffer for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee indicating that Moulitsas makes calls to prospective candidates on behalf of the DCCC. The source was definitely in a position to know, and a review of my notes shows that the quote was what my source said. When I emailed him this morning for clarification, the source said that while he had “brainstormed” with Markos, a different blogger had made the recruiting calls. This is Moulitsas’s position too, and I take him at his word.
My story states that Moulitsas speaks frequently and regularly with DCCC Chair Rahm Emmanuel and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. In fact, he speaks regularly with their staffs, never with Emmanuel, and only very occasionally with Reid.
Moulitsas is correct when he says that the speech he gave to the Senate Democratic caucus took place in the Kennedy Center and not, as my story had reported, in the Capitol’s LBJ room (the normal place such caucuses occur). And I have no reason to doubt Moulitsas when he says he talked about how Democrats can use blogging politically and not about overall political strategy.
Nor do I doubt that he raised for Democratic candidates more than the $500,000 I said he did. When I wrote that his site gets “3.7 million weekly readers,” I should have used the technical term “unique visitors,” which is the closest available approximation of a website’s readership, but is certainly bigger than the actual number of weekly readers. On the issue of the fight at the Democratic Convention, others remember it differently. Moulitsas also takes issue with a number of other smaller points in my piece. He may well be right, though I asked him about several of these in an email before publication and never heard back.
Finally, Markos has taken exception to my description of his readership as “under-35 liberal professionals.” According to the results of a 2004 BlogAd survey of his readership, posted on the Daily Kos site, 63 percent of the readers in that year were 40 years of age or younger. It’s possible that more than 13 percent of those were in the age range of 36 to 40, but even if that is the case, it does not substantially alter my description of Kos readers as part of a “younger generation.” In that same year, 59 percent of Kos readers reported making $60,000 or more, firmly qualifying them as professional.
