so we have no idea what process the four different media outlets that broke six of the accusations (HuffPo, CNN, Jezebel, Politico) used. And two were never vetted at all (Tweeden and Dupuy). I don't know what the vetting standards are at HuffPo and Jezebel, but I don't think we should be thwarting democracy based on them, kicking out duly-elected officials on the basis of accusations on blogs. At the very least, the Senate should have independently corroborated the stories themselves before making a decision.
When WaPo broke the Moore story, they explained in detail their vetting process (even did an AMA on reddit, which was quite informative), which took weeks and involved a lot of people. WaPo has a whole research department devoted to vetting/corroboration/background research. It was one of the reasons they were able to catch the Project Veritas plant (imagine if they didn't have the money and resources to do that, the damage that plant could have done). Their process involved talking to the accusers and their corroborating witnesses multiple times, to make sure their stories stayed consistent. They looked into their backgrounds and history, made sure the papertrail matched their stories as best it could. They looked into if any of these women might have reason to lie. They had 30 witnesses to corroborate 4 accusers. WaPo mentioned how lucky they are to have a research department, because many media outlets don't have the resources or money (or inclination) to properly vet stories anymore.
We got NONE of this background information explaining how they vetted from any of the Franken stories. There were some corroborating witnesses who said the victim told them about it, and one screencap of a Facebook post made a few weeks earlier in one of the anonymous HuffPo stories (we never saw Menz's facebook post, so I can't even say it exists or not). And while I don't discount that, it's also not the avalanche of carefully investigated information from the Moore story. There was often very little time for the reporters to actually vet the stories (Menz, for example, CNN only had a couple days at most to vet her claim). There were big avenues of corroboration that it does not appear anyone did. Nobody ever even asked who the photographer was in Tweeden's case, or Kemplin's (I would imagine the USO photographer would be able to say if they saw Franken grabbed her breast for the five-ten seconds she says he did; ten seconds is a lot longer than people think it is). Or the "It's my right as an entertainer" story from Politico, they never say if they checked with Air America's records, to see if the Congressman she worked for was ever on, never checked to see if she went with him (I also imagine that a Congressman's expense report is public information, so they could have checked theirs to see if they ever traveled there). There would be ways of doing that that would not reveal the accusers identity.
The Moore accusations, the Weinstein accusations, they all got like a five-star vetting treatment. Franken's? Like two-star. Two-and-half at most. Which, hey, is better than no stars, but you can't really compare Motel 6 with the Waldorf-Astoria.
And with Moore, and Spacey, and Trump, and Lauer, and Weinstein, there have been rumors going around for YEARS about all of them, whispered stories of harassment and grabby behavior. And when those stories broke, countless people who worked with them were like "Yeah, he totally does that". That does not exist with Franken, there's no foundation of rumor or off-the-record stories, the people who worked with him could not believe it. [Which doesn't mean Franken is innocent, of course, but it DOES factor into why people have doubts about Franken, why trying to compare him to how people reacted to confirmation that some Legendary Dirtbags were indeed dirtbags doesn't really work.]
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