I hear tell some aging elite “journalist” I honestly thought was dead has been trying to write a nasty article about me for a “major” Canadian newspaper.
The “journalist” has never contacted me (which seems awfully odd, given that I’m the subject and all) but he has contacted some of my friends, all of whom have “cooperated” with him by saying things like, “Dammit! We Mossad agents aren’t allowed to talk about each other in print!!” and hanging up.
Why don’t I care if this article (now, what, two months in the making?) ever appears?
(Besides the fact that I’ll live to dance on the aging “journalist’s” grave, and more people — people who matter, that is — read my Twitter feed and my posts on this blog and elsewhere than anything he writes.)
Have you ever watched someone “read” the paper? They dutifully flip through it, maybe glance at the headlines, then toss it.
If they’re really busy — and most people are — their paper lays unread on their desk all day until they guiltily toss it into the grey bin.
In five years, the New York Times will close its doors for good. None of these people matter anymore.
Ask Michelle Bachman:
Michele Bachmann was on the phone. That alone was unusual. The Minnesota congresswoman generally does not speak to journalists doing stories about her, at least not to journalists from what she refers to as the “mainstream media.” (…)
She was asked about her charge that the program would lead to political “reeducation camps” for its young participants.
Dead silence came over the telephone line.
After a while, it was time for the mainstream media’s next question. “Are you there, Congresswoman?”
The silence lengthened.
“Are you there, Congresswoman?”
(…)
[S]he makes no major pronouncement to anyone outside a favored corps of conservative television and radio talk-show hosts. (…) these days she sticks closest to the shows of conservative commentators who effusively support her.
“She doesn’t need mainstream media any longer,” says Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and a longtime Bachmann watcher. “She has whatever cable show she wants to do, talk radio, the Internet, Fox TV. . . .
“This is likely the new way for many conservative politicians, many outsiders.”
