Thought Leaders continue to think about the irrelevant anti-Clinton report "published" in the Washington Free Beacon, a relatively obscure Koch-friendly online opposition research message board with an ultraconservative agenda.
There are still so many questions to be answered. Is Goodman’s scoop even newsworthy? Why dredge up a politician’s past if there’s nothing in there about prank haircuts or family dogs?
And does Hillary Clinton really warrant this much scrutiny? After all, there’s a near-zero likelihood she’ll be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, since it would be blatantly foolish for a political party that has so vigorously made income inequality its rallying cry to pick a candidate who was paid at least $400,000 last year to sympathize with Goldman Sachs executives.
Right?
And how did Alana Goodman—if that is her real name—go from one day not knowing about the Diane Blair archives at the University of Arkansas to, well, knowing about them all of a sudden? What prompted Goodman to acquire such information and write her cherry-picked, out-of-context summary at the behest of Rand Paul? Did she purchase access to the archive with oil money? Did she conspire with neocon sleeper cells living in Mena, Arkansas? And what about Taiwan?
CNN’s Brian Stelter and The Carl Bernstein tried to get to the bottom of all this Sunday on "Reliable Sources."
"Let me try out a conspiracy theory on you," Stelter told Bernstein. "These papers were reported on by the Washington Free Beacon, like I mentioned. They were promoted by Drudge. Here we are in January [sic] 2014. Is it possible a reporter was, you know, led to these papers, so they would come out now—these quotes would be rehashed now? As opposed to a year or two years from now?"
One would think that the author of such game-changing scoops as "CBS Said to Be Developing Streaming News Channel" and "History Channel Is Eying Remake of ‘Roots’" would have a more congenial attitude toward the practice more commonly referred to as "reporting." But then, this is CNN we are talking about.
Also, the irony of posing this question to Bernstein, whose career-making scoops during the Watergate scandal were hand-fed to him and Bob Woodward by FBI agent Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, seemed to be lost on Stelter. And on Bernstein.
"The great thing about being a reporter," Bernstein said, "is that we don't have crystal balls, and hopefully we’ve got a notebook and we go talk to people." On the other hand, he added, Stetler’s conspiracy theory was "certainly possible."
As far as we can tell, even in this fast-paced new media environment, journalists sometimes interact with people. Sometimes those people say things to journalists. Sometimes those journalists follow-up on what those people tell them.
But what do we know?
As the sore losers in the mainstream media have made perfectly clear over the past several days: When the Free Beacon does it, it’s not reporting.