I guess Tricky Dick was just misunderstood

Bad news at the Chicago Tribune today. Like they did a few weeks ago with a mobster they misidentified Deep Throat in a photo. Turns out a young editor mistakenly ran a picture of Linda Lovelace instead of Mark Felt's.

Even more absurd (but true in this case): the asshole right wing nuts who’ve been all over cable calling the Watergate source a traitor. So a guy who leads a couple reporters to the truth, however ugly, is the bad guy? What kind of rabbit hole did these creeps (and I use the work creep in the Nixonian sense) crawl out of?

It’s pretty goddamn funny that these wing nuts are all over Deep Throat, so to speak, while they hardly got upset when one of their buddies, Robert Novak, outed a diplomat’s wife as a spy.

Getting a lot of hard news isn’t pretty. That’s just one of the reason’s the so-called-reality show allegedly being planned about the day-to-day operations of the New York Daily News is a bad idea. That, and that the boss there is way too much like Ricky Gervais on The Office.

Reporting should not be thought of as sexy, or fodder for some stupid TV show, especially real investigative journalism and not that celebrity shit or a lot of the way things are covered, which is to say rewriting press releases or attending meetings.

Because real hard core journalism is about finding out about people screwing over other people. That means those involved often lie or shade the truth, and the reporter’s job is not just to play “he said, she said,” but to find out what really happened.

Sometimes that involves talking to people who don’t want to be identified for various reasons, sometimes political, sometimes personal and not usually altruistic.

What matters is what really happened. But it a world where:

> Hollywood changes reality to make movies based on a true stories,

> Products are always new and improved

> Ted Koppel gets berated for merely reading the names of the war dead on Nightline

> And where the White House says “so what if there were no weapons of mass destruction”

As a philosopher put it, reality is getting buried in bullshit.