The Mercenary’s Cookbook

The thing about the DC bubble that encapsulates the talking heads and shields them from the public, is that every now and then, they have to walk among us, and at the convention, the distrust is palpable.

When a FOX News reporter tried to interview some passing protestors, they all immediately told him to fuck off. Then, they started to chant, "Fuck FOX News" until they had to cut away.

The panel discussion of MSNBC talking heads can’t get away with much without the crowd coming down on them. Buchanan is usually booed down for his GOP spin, and Maddow cheered. Chris Matthews mentioned talking with some die-hard Hillary Clinton supporters who were quite hard on him.

Usually these guys are insulated in their studios, interviewing Very Important People, and rarely coming in contact with the public, and they can convince themselves that they speak for average Joes. Every now and then, however, these guys have to venture out in public, and average Joes are giving a piece of their mind.

Here is a headline that ought to forever be retired from local reporting on the Democratic Convention: the “Survival Guide”. 5280, Denver Magazine, Denver Post, Fort Collins: Now and Yellow Scene have all gotten on board this train.

The Rocky Mountain News  publisher John Temple apologized for mistakenly saying Obama had Kenyan citizenship, which led to him being declared “Worst Person in the World” By Keith Olberman on Tuesday.

However, Denver PR Blog raises a good point:

The timeline of what happened is clear, but left unexplained is exactly what process exists that lets staffers rip “facts” from the Internet and package them as verified material.

One of the great questions of modern journalism is how, exactly, these rumors get picked up by what should be responsible news organizations and spread unquestioningly, until they become "fact". Like Hamlet, we are left to ask, "Duped, or playing dumb?"

This seems to point to duped. I often get the sense that reporters are often handed oppo research, and simply pass it on, especially if that contact is a good source — meaning, they give them a lot of good stories, that turn out to be crap. So they don’t much care if they’ve been had, so long as they make the front page, and the editors don’t care if a story is  BS, so long as it pleases the right people and gets links.

As evidence for the "playing dumb" explanation, look at "The Most Trusted Name in News", whom are happily pimping the latest fabrications from Corsi, the man behind the Swift Boat Vets. They know the abomination in Obama Nation is Corsi, yet, they give him air time. The justification is that Corsi is a bestselling author, but so are a lot of people who wrote books that aren’t conservative fabrications, and yet don’t get this kind of media backing.

Now, we see that CNN is also asking the tough questions about whether or not Obama is the anti-Christ. Fifty-one percent of CNN’s viewers are Democrats, which means it’s their fault for willingly tuning in to the network to be brow-beaten with crap.

This Sunday, we get a condescending piece in the New York Times about liberal Boulder, called “Twenty-Five Square Miles Surrounded by Reality.” The realists being, those who don’t recycle or ride their bikes to work because they know global warming is a myth.

I especially liked this, on the liberals favorite conservative, David Brooks:

The New York Times columnist David Brooks has made immense fun of it as a latte town of bourgeois bohemians with their in-your-jowls liberalism and an uncanny ability to accrue wealth while pretending to care only about following their creative visions. According to American City Business Journals, Boulder has a higher percentage of college and postcollege graduates than anywhere else in the country.

One doesn’t have to wonder how Brooks would react to a feature travel article portraying some rural small town in Colorado as Bible-thumping, prairie dog shooting, tobacco chewers, whom are impervious to the realities of, say, the Iraq War. Such a portrayal of stereotypes would be considered “elitist”, because the elites in DC think all it takes is a latte reference to endear them to the red necks they exploit to benefit the high rollers who invite them to their soirees.