Of course we’re all in mourning over the passing of Hi magazine, the honorably motivated, but unfortunately infrequently read, glossy designed to bring the truth about our freedoms to the benighted, thus causing them to realize the error of their ways and fall in love with US foreign policy.
But I’d missed the encouraging news seized upon by Abu Aardvark from a recent State Department briefing:
QUESTION: Just one last thing from me. Do you have any figures on the website traffic at all?MR. MCCORMACK: Well, the — what I’ve been told is that there are 3 million hits. Now —
QUESTION: Per day or —
MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah, it’s per day.
QUESTION: Three million hits per day?
MR. MCCORMACK: Per day. Adam?
MR. ERELI: Yep.
MR. MCCORMACK: Yep, 3 million per day. Now, here’s one thing — we will endeavor to find out the answer to this question for you, I don’t have it yet — are those unique viewers or are those page views. So at this point, I don’t know the answer to that and we’re going to find out the answer for you…
These guys are so used to lying that they do it reflexively: the first thing that occurs to them, even in a press conference where their words are being recorded, is to lie. Abu Aardvark takes them to task; turns out that 60,000 is closer to the mark than three million. Which, as he says, is still a surprising number. I suspect State Department bots.
So what’s encouraging about all this, you ask? That the State Department press flacks are aware that there’s a difference between page views and unique viewers.
