Posted 9:09 AM by Scoobie Davis

A Note to Fans of Scoobie Davis Online
I’m going on hiatus out of necessity. My flunky job is ending and the real job I was expecting has not been offered to me. Plus, the last check I received was not as big as I thought it would be. So right now, I’m scrambling to get a gig.

That hurts because blogging is one of my joys in life. Obviously, a lot of you out there like my site because October was my biggest month for hits (I exceeded my previous record by over 17,000 hits). What I am asking is that if you have found this site to have been of use to you, then please do the following: Click here and contribute to my Amazon Honor System account. A small contribution will go a long way.

I’m retooling for 2004 and I have big plans to throw some monkey wrenches in the hard right’s smear machine on a level that goes way beyond my previous efforts—trust me, I have big plans. For those of you new to this sight, let me tell you a little about what I have done and who I am.

If you’re not familiar with this web site, here are just a few of the highlights:

1. I was the first person to publicly announce that Ann Coulter’s book Slander was a fraud (I made the announcement on the publication date because I had an advance copy). This led to serious fact checking by other bloggers and media people and culminated in a critical article about Slander in the Columbia Journalism Review.
2. I have gone on talk radio shows and confronted the hosts and guests (see the sidebar labeled “Prank Calls”).
3. As part of HorowitzWatch, I have been a particularly big thorn in the side of David Horowitz. Recently, I caught Horowitz repeating a notorious urban legend. In the past, I have caught Horowitz in some major embarrassments (e.g., click here and here). Horowitz has responded by calling me among other things, “scurrilous” and “deranged.”
4. I have kept people updated on other members of the Scaife Internet Network such as Joseph Farah and Christopher Ruddy.
5. I documented the conflict of interest and journalistic misconduct of two Fox News analysts.
6. I was the first blogger to highlight the phony quote in Bill O’Reilly’s new book Who’s Looking Out for You?
7. I confronted Scaife hatchet man Joseph Farah and caught him in a big lie on the Washington Post’s Live Online forum.
8. I had a scoop about how George W. Bush invited an admitted violator of the Espionage Act and apologist for a notorious racist to his Crawford ranch. In case there are any members of the mainstream media lurking out there, nobody from the mainstream media has picked up on this story.

Prior to 2002, I was a well-paid administrator who came to Los Angeles because I was writing, acting, and doing other creative projects. I have always been interested in politics, but during the 1990’s, I found that hate radio and Scaife’s “journalists” were engaged in a massive effort to smear Bill Clinton that extended to his family (at the risk of sounding like an ad hominem argument, I suspect that at least part of the reason for Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction was his inability to live with himself—I know if I were in his shoes, I couldn’t). During the 2000 race, I was appalled at the way in which the right’s smear machine was trying to portray Al Gore as a pathological liar—with the help of members of the supposed liberal mainstream media. Seeing the beneficiary of media bias, George W. Bush, carrying Bernard Goldberg’s absurd book Bias (read comments about it in Al Franken’s Lies and Alterman’s What Liberal Media?) added insult to injury.

I was sick and tired of how the hard right has been riding roughshod over decency during the past decade and how the right-wing smear machine had not been meaningfully addressed by the media (e.g., Ann Coulter’s intellectually dishonest Slander received favorable reviews in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times). It was right after the publication of Bias that I told my boss I didn’t want to work there anymore and I turned to blogging. I see myself in the role of doing the job that Howard Kurtz is paid to do (but is not doing). It’s been a rough two years financially, but I think I’ve made a difference. Doing flunky part-time jobs and taking public transportation in LA (which I can’t do now because of the transit strike) is not glamorous but not too many other people out there are doing what I’m doing. I live in the McArthur Park area of LA (and if I don’t come up with next month’s rent, I’m going to be living in McArthur Park). Nevertheless, I’m glad I made these choices in my life.