One “Doug Thompson” is the often-lambasted founder and publisher of Capitol Hill Blue, the oldest political news site on the Internet and a controversial one involved in several incidents that have cast doubt on the site’s credibility.

That’s me. I’m the founder and publisher of Capitol Hill Blue. I’m the guy responsible for every bit of trouble caused by the web site and every problem it has encountered, even if the incident involved another writer or staff member.

I own and operate a number of web sites but Blue is the one that most Internet readers know and the site that most use to judge me.  A month ago, I wrote a story that dealt with the sordid side of our history. It didn’t draw much comment. That’s OK. I wrote it to try and be honest with readers.  Many readers out there have made up their minds.  They don’t care to hear another side to the story.

I’m hardly the only one who’s been burned by fakes: Janet Cooke at The Washington Post, Jayson Blair at The New York Times, Stepthen Glass at The New Republic: They made up stories, fabricated sources and embarrassed their employers. While I would never dare compare my little web publication to those famous publications, it shows that even the great ones get conned.

But let’s set the record straight on a few things:

–Yes, I wrote the story that claimed then-President George W. Bush had called the Constitution a “god damned piece of paper.”   At the time, I believed the people who passed on the information.   I no longer do. I pulled the story from the Capitol Hill Blue database and sent President Bush a personal letter of apology;

–Yes, I used — too many times — stories that quoted a “former Republican operative” who called himself George Harleigh.  Then the university where he claimed to once work — called me to say they had never heard of the guy and I found out we had been using quotes sent in by email originally to a former editor and that practice had continued. That sad fact that I never checked him out was my fault;

–Yes, I once quoted a Terrance Wilkerson who claimed he was a  consultant for the CIA.  He turned out to be a phony but I wasn’t the only one he fooled in Washington.  I pulled the story and apologized to readers;

–Yes, we made too many other mistakes, like claiming President Bush was taking anti-depressants, prescribed by the White House physician that turned out be false. We printed a story that said Nancy Reagan was refusing to endorse George W. Bush Jr.  That turned out to be wrong and we corrected the story.

As the story published a month ago admitted, I was way too full of myself and so sure that any bad story about any politician just had to be true.

It was stupid, it was bad journalism and I paid a price for it. Our readership dropped for a while and the bloggers had a field day nailing me. I deserved it.

The faker who claimed to be George Harleigh has since published a web site admitting his fakery and claiming he was a disgruntled former Capitol Hill employee.  However, he claimed to work for a former Congressman who is now dead and I have not been able to confirm that the name he is using now is real. I doubt it is.

Another web site journalisnt.com made a lot of charges and then changed the web site entirely and apologized for what they said about us. However, in both cases, the web sites listed no names of editors, writers or owners and hid their ownership behind a proxy.

But we’ve done some good things too. I proud of stories like

–I’m proud of our story exposing those who exploit young girls who want to be models (Underage and selling their sexuality on the web)

–Our series on the con artists and outright criminals in Congress (America’s Criminal Class: The Congress of the United States)

(The original version of this series included a tally of numbers of alledged crimess and other offenses by members. The numbers were tallied by a  researcher doing volunteer work for CHB at the time and did not include names. The list was widely circulated via email and the ‘Net and we were smeared by FactCheck.Org for what director Brooks Jackson called our “repeated failures” to disclose the names. He neglected to mention that 90 percent of those requests came from him.  I pulled the numbers list from the story and told Jackson but he never updated the story on FactCheck despite three requests that I do so.

In fact, Jackson is so obsessed with nailing CHB that he refuses to correct any errors about our stories. I’ve sent Jackson two emails and left a voicemail over the last year asking him to correct mistakes.  The last email, sent Jan. 1 of this year, read:

Back when you were doing one of the pieces on Capitol Hill Blue, you asked me to let you know if any of he pieces cited in your article were changed.

This is to let you know that the piece on Bush and the Constitution has been changed and reads:

“This article was based on sources that we thought, at the time, were reliable. We have since discovered reasons to doubt their veracity. For that reason, this article has been removed from our database.”

I no longer stand behind that article or its conclusions and have said so in answers to several recent queries.  In addition, I have asked that it be removed from a documentary film.

In addition, the article cites:

Doug Thompson, “The eyes of a madman”  CapitolHillBlue.com  6 Dec 2007.

Has been removed entirely.

I’ve spent much of the past few years trying to redesign, refocus and rebuild my web site. It hasn’t been easy.  You might find the column printed today useful:

“Judge us now to see if we have learned from the past” http://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/37544

When you wrote your last piece, I sent you an email and asked that you correct some factual errors in what you wrote, including:

We also note that Thompson expresses extreme personal hostility toward Bush, calling him in one recent article a “madman,” a “despot,” and “a man without honor, a leader without conscience and a human being without a shred of decency or humanity.”

I felt you neglected to note that I show the same attitude towards all elected officials. I wrote even worse things about Bill Clinton and have not been kind to Barack Obama either.

Your wrote:

“Thompson is a former Republican congressional aide and political consultant. He was manager of the National Association of Realtors political action committee for several years, ending in 1992.”

I was, in fact, Vice President for Political Programs Administration for the Realtors and did a lot more than “manage” the PAC. I oversaw the Independent Expenditures Program, the local initiatives program and other political operations. The PAC manager, in fact, worked for me.

When you wrote the piece about the “criminal congress,” you stated that I wrote the series.  I did not. The author and researchers were clearly identified in the articles. I did not write them.

The Mark Twain quote came from a Hal Holbrook videotape “Mark Twain Tonight.”  Because of the question you raised (very sarcastically I might add), I changed it to (purportedly) said.

I could not find the box with the researcher’s notes (probably stilll sitting in that storeroom in Fairfax), I removed the statistics from the series and let it stand on the cases cited with each members of Congress’ name and the documentation surrounding the event.  I did not double check the facts (which I should have done), nor did I write or edit the stories.  But they are still my responsibility.

You make a point of saying that FactCheck.Org corrects its mistakes. I’m asking you to please do so in this case.

Maybe it’s time someone started double-checking FactCheck.Org

Related articles

• Judge us now to see if we have learned from the past (capitolhillblue.com)
• How to Become a ‘Spin Detector’ | FactCheck.org (allthingsreform.org)
• Crowdsourced Fact-Checking? What We Learned from Truthsquad (pbs.org)
• Harry Shearer: Fact-Checking the Bush Memoir: New Orleans (huffingtonpost.com)
• Fact-checking: Does anyone care? (politico.com)