UPDATE: The Carnahan Campaign has amended their filing to list the real address of Veritas Research. The St Louis Post Dispatch, acting on the information uncovered by 24thstate, today posted a story establishing the direct involvement of Arango and Dillon. Veritas Research LLC is the media company hired by the Carnahan campaign, and it was registered by Dillon on July 23 in Colorado (and updated to include Arango on Oct 1). At this point, the two journalists are in danger of having violated federal election law by creating and promoting a website with no disclosure that was paid for directly by the Carnahan campaign. The story told by Michael Corwin now has serious credibility problems, as does the reputation of Jeannine Dillon and Victor Arango.

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On October 19th, a website popped up alleging a cover-up in the Catholic priest sex scandal by Missouri congressional candidate Ed Martin. The site, TheRealEdMartin.com, did not get much attention until Ed Martin threw a press conference denouncing the site as a smear against him and all Catholics by his opponent, Russ Carnahan.

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The site, and the supposed investigation behind the site, was created by Michael Corwin, a Democrat opposition researcher out of New Mexico, in tandem with Jeannine Dillon, a former Dateline producer who had teamed with Corwin to win a prestigious Edward R. Murrow award. Martin claimed that Corwin was a paid Carnahan operative. Corwin and the Carnahan campaign admitted he was paid $2000 to do opposition research, but Corwin claims he quit the campaign in June when they wouldn’t run the story. At that point, Corwin maintains he connected with Dillon to push the story over Carnahan’s objections.

There is quite a bit of controversy about the timing, payment and timeline of Corwin’s story, but lost in the shuffle is the attempt to use the Dateline brand to give credibility to an obvious smear campaign. Dillon put her credibility on the line for this story, but she isn’t the only former Dateline producer to do so. An investigation by 24thstate.com turned up evidence that a second former journalist, a veteran of Dateline, CBS, and NBC, an Emmy winner and Edward R. Murrow winner, conducted the online smear campaign, using anonymous names to push the story.

The whisper campaign yielded three clues as to who was behind the scandal. A commenter named rotciv at an alternative weekly. A diarist named cosmopolatino at FiredUpMissouri (a blog tied to the Carnahan family). And the phone number of a man who called himself “Victor Manuel.”

The clues led to Victor Arango, a former Dateline Producer and communications director tied to Jeannine Dillon in real estate documents and linked in their associations with Dateline. The name ROTCIV is Victor backwards, and the cosmopolatino diary shared an email address with Arango, as well. Victor also called from a phone number that was traced back to his position at Real Capital Solutions.

Victor called from his real phone number, gave his real first name, but a fake last name, and didn’t expect to get caught.

In calling the Ed Martin campaign, he was trying to get Martin to react, so that TheRealEdMartin website could be talked about. To see an example of how this works – the Post-Dispatch had yet to write about the site, presumably because it is so obviously a hit piece. But when Martin called the press conference, it was fair game. Now, the story had been shopped around. Charles Jaco, a local Fox reporter, let slip during the Martin press conference that Anderson Cooper had called looking for more information. Martin faced either a national story without his input, or pushing the story out first, giving unfriendly reporters like Jaco the “right” to report on it.

This was a coordinated online smear campaign for an investigative report paid for, at least in part, by a sitting Congressman’s congressional campaign. These two former award winning journalists, Jeannine Dillon and Victor Arango, have been caught in an attempt to push a false story to the benefit of a sitting Congressman who shares their views on climate change and global governance.

Victor Arango left multiple anonymous comments at the Riverfront Times where he hid his relationship to the story, as well as a diary posted at a Missouri progressive blog, pretending to be a disinterested observer.

Jeannine Dillon also tried to push the story, leaving comments on Facebook pages for the Democrat Party and Prevent Child Abuse America. In those postings, she tried to push a story to prominence using an abuse victim network, without identifying who she was or her role in the website.

It must be asked: Is this what all reporters from CBS and NBC news are really like? How could an Emmy award-winning journalist and an Edward R Murrow award-winning journalist be reduced to such reprehensible actions? Did they try to push the story through the media and fail? Anderson Cooper had enough interest to call the local Fox channel for an investigation, but it wasn’t moving fast enough until Ed Martin called the press conference to get ahead of the smear. Add in the suspicious payments to a research department at the University of Arizona that researches speaking to the dead, and you get a very nasty, very under-handed, almost certainly illegal coordination hit piece, run by former Dateline journalists, and financed by Russ Carnahan’s re-election campaign.

This is the state of modern journalism. Handed the keys to a juicy story about an attack piece that failed, no media outlet was interested in discovering who was behind a blatant smear of Catholics and a congressional candidate. Once again, an unpaid blogger presented the evidence. It is our hope that the media finally reports on the matter, calling out their former comrades for conduct unbecoming of a professional journalist.