Fight the Friday Doc Dump!

| Fri Oct. 30, 2009 2:14 PM PDT

Late Friday afternoon, the Obama adminstration released a bunch of its visitor logs as well as notes from Dick Cheney's interviews with the FBI regarding the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity. So after you read about how Cheney couldn't remember anything, consider this: Politicians release documents on Fridays when they don't want people paying attention to them.

Politicians know that fewer people read the Saturday papers (actually, few people read papers at all anymore), so fewer people will notice the newspaper articles. They also know that since most people read news websites like MotherJones.com and Talking Points Memo at work and most people work Monday to Friday, fewer people will see the news on the internet. Finally, cable news and broadcast news don't have nearly as large of an audience over the weekend, so they will be less able to amplify what the newspapers and websites report. If you're trying to hide something juicy, Friday is the day to dump it. Even if someone does find it in the huge mass of information you release, by Monday the news cycle will have moved on.

Anyway, you can help fight against the Friday doc dump: check out the visitor logs and the Cheney documents yourself, and send us an email at scoop [at] motherjones [dot] com if you find anything interesting. The faster we find the juicy bits, the better chance we have of letting people know about them. Thanks!

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Nick Baumann covers national politics for Mother Jones' DC Bureau. For more of his stories, click here. He can also be found on twitter.

Comments

Fighting the Doc Dump

Submitted by Ferumbras (not verified) on Fri Oct. 30, 2009 5:56 PM PDT.

While I agree that the friday document dump is problematic in terms of keeping the public informed, I think that websites (such as motherjones, but also newspaper sites like newyorktimes) have a key ability to combat this: you can keep such doc-dump information on the splash page through monday, or repost it on monday morning, recapping what's been found over the course of the weekend and linking to the first post about it. I would advocate not having it be simply in the list of must-reads sent out, as it's too easy to pass over those, particularly for individuals who use aggregator programs like Google Reader.

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