Media Seems Primed for Another Stephen Glass
One of the things that has always struck me about the
Stephen Glass incident at the New Republic and other mags is that the stories Glass sold to TNR were ones that confirmed the biases of the editors of that magazine, and thus, even though they were wildly improbable (one concerned a church dedicated to worshipping former President George H.W. Bush), they were published.
Today, Ryan Lizza
writes of the glee that went around Kerry Central on election day as news of the obviously fraudulent polls (whether fraud by the pollsters or by the respondents to be determined) went around. But get this detail:
I compared notes with Jamie Rubin, a senior foreign policy adviser. He popped open a message on his PDA that showed two long columns of state abbreviations and numbers. The first line showed Kerry ahead by 17 points in one swing state. We agreed to swap any new numbers that came our way. The exit polls were like crack.
The mood among Kerry staffers was celebratory. VIP guests roamed the hotel lobby hugging and high-fiving. By the time Joe Lockhart briefed the press in the afternoon, the campaign had started to pivot toward a message that discouraged talk of litigation, recounts, or overtime of any sort. "We think the system has worked today," Lockhart said on Fox News. "There were thousands of lawyers deployed to make sure that no one tried to take unfair advantage, and, by and large, it's worked. I've seen very few reports of irregularities. ... There's not much going on." They were so confident that they were preemptively striking at any Republican legal efforts to steal Kerry's victory.
Ahead by 17 in a swing state? I mean, alarm bells aren't going off in your head? Would they have been twice as happy if Kerry were shown as up by 34 points?
