This piece, by Andrew Ferguson in Commentary, is almost too easy, but it sure is fun. Did the little furry mammals tuck into the dinosaur eggs with so much gusto?
The tiny corner of the New York Times empire where David Barstow works is called the investigative unit. The name has an impressive urgency to it, like the title of a TV spin-off–CSI: Times Investigative Unit. You can imagine guys in Weejuns and khakis getting a hot tip and springing into action, yanking their tweed coats off the backs of chairs and shouting something irreverent and ironical over their shoulders as they bolt for the newsroom door.
Perhaps a new “torture memo” has been leaked; maybe a politician has committed an act of creative accounting on Supplement B (3) subpart vii of his financial-disclosure form. Or maybe a large number of Americans way out there in the land beyond the Bronx have been caught holding political opinions that are dangerously bizarre. TIU is on the case.
These strange-thinking Americans, loosely roped together as the Tea Party movement, sent David Barstow on his most recent investigation. His assignment lasted for five uninterrupted months and bore literary fruit, with a 4,500-word front-page story on February 16. “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right,” the headline read–aptly enough, for a premonitory suggestion of bombs going off just over the horizon rumbled through Barstow’s story. To the astute Times reader lingering with the paper over breakfast, the hints were unmistakable.
There was the dateline, for one thing: Sandpoint, Idaho. The reader might rub his chin?.?.?.?-Sandpoint? Vaguely familiar…rings a bell…let’s see…Wait! God Almighty! Yes, that Sandpoint, notorious 15 years ago as the home of gun-slinging Randy Weaver and his Ruby Ridge survivalist compound, the headquarters of the Aryan Nation group of gun owners, a hothouse of gun-owning militias and paramilitary groups with their guns?.?.?.
Yes, it’s time to play”Christian Militia’s Comin’ To Git Ya,” one of the favorite sports of this guy:
In case you don’t recognize the former staple of the now-irrelevant Imus In the Morning radio program, that would be the well-fed former Times drama critic, Frank Rich, a non-bestselling author and a failed showbiz wannabee who somehow has parlayed this record of non-distinction into a prestigious corner lot among the most valuable journalistic real estate in America, where he carries water not only for the Democrat Party, but for the Times itself.
By now our Times reader would be drizzling flop sweat into the muesli: “Honey! Call the doorman! We’re getting the hell out of here!” The alarm ran through the Times newsroom, too, and a week later showed itself, reliably, in a column by Frank Rich, who is not only the exemplary Times writer but also the model Times reader. Barstow’s report was “chilling,” Rich wrote. “Anyone who was cognizant during the [Timothy] McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history.” To more skeptical readers of the Times–a vanishing breed, since most people with a skeptical turn of mind have apparently given up on the Times altogether–the shudder that Barstow induced in Frank Rich looks like a case of classical conditioning, an exercise in stimulus-response as predictable as anything in Dr. Pavlov’s lab: Glenn Beck > Oath Keepers > secession > gun. Brrrr indeed.
The Tea Partiers declined to go along, though. From October, when Barstow first ventured into darkest Idaho, to February, when his story arrived to sound the alarm, their press coverage underwent a discernible shift in tone and attitude, even at the Times. “Tea Party Looks to Move from Fringe to Force” was the headline over a straightforward Times story written by Kate Zernike in early February. At ABC, a political correspondent suddenly discovered a new, friendlier Tea Party: “The majority of supporters are long-time Republicans,” she said, “but there are growing numbers of independents, and even some former Obama supporters.”
What changed? Everybody loves a winner, of course, even reporters, and the blindsiding victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts proved that the Tea Party’s ideas could move an unlikely electorate. There was also the weight of reality, which given time can erode the most ardent fantasy: the movement didn’t contain enough Aryans and survivalists to sustain the caricature forever, and sooner or later a reporter runs out of Obama = Hitler signs with which to scare the customers.
It must be tough to run a major, albeit dying, newspaper when you have to keep changing your story on an almost daily basis, but such is the fate of the dinosaur media, caught between the asteroids and the marmots.
Read the whole thing, then over to you lot for more comment, correction and general merriment.
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