The nerve center is a cavernous room of 22 rows of makeshift wooden desks, filled with casually dressed young staffers in headphones who work in shifts from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. Most of the 84 employees are divided into teams with nicknames like “Puppet Masters” and “Ministry of Truth,” and when their Snapstream software (which can record 14 channels at once) picks up a controversial comment, they fire off a specially marked email called a “Batsignal”—up to 500 of them a day, reviewed by their bosses.
“I thought this was something liberals always needed to combat misinformation in the media,” Hananoki says while downloading another Huckabee radio appearance. It was Hananoki who discovered Huckabee telling New York radio host Steve Malzberg that Barack Obama grew up in Kenya, forcing the former Arkansas governor to spend days explaining a dumb mistake.
On the Portman flap, Huckabee tells The Daily Beast that news outlets “take at face value a breathless blog post from a highly partisan and distorted source like Media Matters and treat it as a ‘source.’ Then it’s electronically photocopied by what used to be legitimate journalists who now lack “integrity and fact-checking.” (In fairness, Media Matters posted the complete transcript and audio.)
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