Reporters, apparently having insufficient news to cover, have found that staged news is more easily controlled, requires little shoe leather, and reaches appropriate conclusions; I suspect it also reinforces the reporters’ sense of superiority. It does betray, however, a misunderstanding of the implied contract between a retail merchant and his customer – a more nuanced respect than merely (or even always) that the customer is right. Wretchard posts about ABC’s visit to the Czech Stop I’ve mentioned before. An actor behind the counter refuses to serve an actress in hijab. He is rude and disrespectful. Customers react – sometimes protective of the actress, sometimes critical, but always, of course, naively. (Update: Wretchard’s commentors are also, as usual, insightful until somehow they become completely off-topic- I don’t understand how that can happen.)
Ginny
“Poaching” or “Exiling”
Megan McArdle at Instapundit describes another case of Lancet’s preaching that probably deserves the Shannon approach: apparently it is a “crime” to “poach” third world health professionals. While there is much to be said for a sense of duty and a sense of loyalty to one’s home turf, most of us consider the importance of those ties as the business of each doctor.
It does, however, make me curious about a phenomenon I’ve noticed locally but have no idea of its breadth. Some of our readers may have a context.
The Spring of Smears – Unfortunately, Part 1
At Instapundit, Althouse quotes Hoyt, the NY Times “public editor,” on the now infamous (but at least usefully fund-raising) investigation of McCain . Keller defends the story “about a man nearly felled by scandal who rebuilt himself as a fighter against corruption but is still ‘careless about appearances, careless about his reputation, and that’s a pretty important thing to know about somebody who wants to be president of the United States.'”
Of course, we might question the paper’s carelessness about “appearances” and, indeed, its “reputation.” The defense seems to be that the nonexistent “sex” scandal was not important; the role of lobbyists and the earlier scandal were. Such innocence on the part of the paper, such dirty mindedness on the part of its readers! Ah, if we were only as serious as they.