The press will print anything.
Lie all you want.
No one bothered checking the story of hucksters Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer, who last week posed as "researchers" in order to scam Tom Biscardi, who was stupid enough to believe such a thing existed.
It was a rubber-and-plastic Halloween costume with various body parts (parts is parts) stuffed inside it.
What was most annoying about the whole story is that, until the scamsters skipped, the press ate it up. No one bothered checking into the fact that Clayton County, Georgia, where one of these guys was supposedly a white cop, may be the most corrupt force in America, a joke. No one checked into the background of Dyer. Nope, they just trooped right in, acted like everything was on the up-and-up, and became complicit in the fraud.
Then they got all high-and-mighty. Ignoring their complicity. Ignoring their cupidity. Ignoring their own venality.
This is worse than that old Kirk Douglas chestnut Ace in the Hole. At least in Billy Wilder’s story there was a real man, trapped in a real cave, for Douglas’ newspaper character to exploit. Here there was nothing, meat in a rubber suit.
TeeVee and newspaper people love to get all high-and-mighty, acting
like they’re real journalists and we’re just a bunch of DFH bloggers.
Well, your news shows are nothing but talk shows, and your newspapers
are thinner than tissue paper, and you don’t have any more of a budget
than the rest of us have any more.
So get off your high horse and either get to work on new business
models that will generate the money you need to do your job, or admit
that you can’t do squat without the blogosphere.
