The Wall Street Journal's Amy Chozick is already facing a wave of criticism for using a Yahoo message board to find sources for her "Is Barack Obama too skinny to be president?" article. Now comes a real charge: That what she was actually asking is whether Obama is "too black" to be president. Says Chozick: "I can't even respond to that. That's ridiculous." [Slate]

When journalists need sources, stat, to include in a story they're writing about, say, fall fashions, messy roommates, or whether food stamped with "organic" really influences your grocery shopping decisions, they often turn to ProfNet, the PR Newswire service that connects reporters with people willing to answer questions via email. But when Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Chozick needed to produce a story about whether Barack Obama's physical stature influenced the way voters thought about him, she created her own thread on a Yahoo message board to solicit feedback. And feedback she got — she even included one of the quotes in her article "Too Fit to Be President?: Facing an Overweight Electorate, Barack Obama Might Find Low Body Fat a Drawback." Went the copy: "'I won't vote for any beanpole guy,' [a] Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board." What Chozick didn't happen to mention in any of the article's 1,400 words, however, is that the note was posted to her message board thread, which she titled with the loaded question, "Is Obama too skinny to be president?"

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