WaPo outs woman who it says faked Roy Moore story

I agree with all of this for the most part. The thing that concerns me, though, is that journalists indeed make mistakes, even the best. But that doesn't mean their message or their quest for the truth isn't noble.

What O'Keefe and others like him would like to do is take those small, often innocent and inconsequential, mistakes and turn them into "proof" of media bias or dishonesty.

I'm all for someone making sure journalists are doing their due diligence, but this is obviously more than that. This is trying to turn any little misstep into something it's not, and that's very dangerous when you have tens of millions of people in this country who will believe anything.

 

But enough about the Trump administration.

 

That happened so fast it made my head spin. I was seeing "fake news" from both sides of the aisle. For example, liberals were passing around stories about how Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist swimmer, was going on a paid speaking tour. It didn't strike me as controversial at all until I saw @YankeeFan bitching about the "fake news" label on here. Had no clue it was a partisan football.

 

The point of the bullshit sting was never to get the Washington Post to buy the fake story, although that would have been nice.

The point was to get questions on tape like "Don't you think it's great that this is going to sink Roy Moore?" and if the reporter so much as chuckled politely, scream to the sky about how this proves they're out to get him.

 

Yeah, she overplayed her hand. It was like a guy wearing a wire asking repeatedly, "I'm totally with you on Fat Tomato for dinner carryout. Totally with you. But the Don definitely plans to have Louis the Lip killed, right?"

 

Walk-in stories get super extra scrutiny from every newsroom. It's the stories that ain't so from sources that are in a position where they could reasonably know something that sink you. As for O'Keefe, I think having challenged an institution more powerful, professional and above all smarter than himself, he will set his sites downward, looking for targets that are poor, obscure and uninformed who are symbolic hate objects for the mentally and morally damaged folks of his audience -- like some young black woman registering to vote at the wrong precinct or something. Trouble with this is, the reactions of the poor and obscure are hard to predict. He exists to hurt people. Sooner or later, he will hurt someone a little unbalanced and more than a little armed and get his fool head blown off. That's bad, the last thing the world needs is him as a martyr. But I won't weep if the news comes.

 

yep

"Again, Phillips had arrived early and was waiting for McCrummen, her purse resting on the table. When McCrummen put her purse near Phillips’s purse to block a possible camera, Phillips moved hers."

They mention that she asked repeatedly about the reporters opinion on how this would affect the election. Snip here cut there and suddenly its the reporter dragging info out of this person in hopes of sabotaging moore.

 

Does anyone think this story, the various reports of "reporters" from the "Washington Post" randomly calling people for dirt, and even the allegations against politicians isn't being "managed" to some extent? So far it appears to have worked, Moore is up six at this point. You could never convince people that Moore isn't a perv. Everyone knows he is - but muddy the waters a bit and you can vote for him and at least say "he's no worse than anyone else."
One of the reasons most Republicans do tend to make appeals for non-white voters isn't to so much win their support, but to make white swing-voters feel better.

 

Like the first story didn't get him? Which wasn't their intent, of course ... to report.

 

Conservative Tries to Prove Washington Post Is Fake News, Proves Opposite

"Another reason O’Keefe’s plot collapsed again is because it is premised on a ludicrously false worldview. The Washington Post does not, in fact, publish unverified accusations just because they’re against Republicans. His various attempts to prove rampant voter fraud have failed in part because voter fraud is not rampant.

But this larger conceptual problem with O’Keefe’s enterprise creates a secondary problem, which is that the people who are dumb enough to believe these conspiracy theories are not generally smart enough to carry out a competent entrapment scheme. "

 

Another shoe drops.