Larry Pfeifer said he made up a story about Reid’s eye injury, which the senator incurred during an admittedly-bizarre exercise accident, after reading an unsubstantiated rumor in a conservative blog of Reid being beaten up by the mafia. Using a pseudonym, Pfeifer contacted the blogger John Hinderaker and spun a tale of a drunken fight between the Reid brothers, seemingly corroborated by Larry Reid’s DUI arrest around that time.
Hinderaker published the story, though he did not vouch for its veracity. However, that was enough to get the rumor mill going. Per the Las Vegas Sun:
The rumor spread quickly after Hinderaker published it April 3, landing Pfeifer on conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham’s radio program six days later when Hinderaker was a guest host, and leading to a conversation between Pfeifer and Rush Limbaugh. Pfeifer said he tried to get on Limbaugh’s show, where he planned to admit he’d made up the story.Limbaugh, who has been suspicious of Reid’s story, declined Pfeifer as a guest but did air the rumor.
Pfeifer said Hinderaker and Limbaugh never inquired after his true identity, or did anything else to verify the story. “They had no problem using a story that had nothing but some guy’s word,” he said. “Not one of them knew my real name. I didn’t even give them my phone number.”
Three that come to mine.....Brian Williams, Sabrina Rubin Erdely's reporting of the Virginia Tech 'gang rape', and of course the continued love affiair with Lena Dunham even though she was proven a liar and ruined a mans reputation...
ReplyDeleteAt least Rolling Stones unabashedly apoligized for their gross error in reporting... most unusual...
Long way from Walter Cronkite...
I see a little difference here though TS, but want to be clear upfront that I believe there are probably plenty of left wing sites that I am not aware of that would be just as quick to run with some salacious bit of bullshit. To the point though, we are talking about a false story that was fed to an audience who clearly will believe almost anything that is said by one of "their people". When McCain had to rip the microphone away from that crazy woman who called Obama a muslim from Kenya, it was both admirable and scary.
DeleteI'm not sure it's entirely fair to keep ripping the media when the audience doesn't hold them accountable. NBC did the right thing after the fact and so did Rolling Stone. I gotta admit though, I have no idea what the Lena Dunhma thing is about. Will Limbaugh come back and tell his audience that the story was complete bullshit? Even when the media had more integrity, I think the people were still largely willing to believe what was told to them.
RUSH: Okay. Okay, so I'm the guy responsible for the story that Dingy Harry got beat up by the mob in his bathroom. Now, I did offer here that I don't think the nature of his injuries was such that this wasn't a run-in with an exercise machine or the elastic band, whatever the story was. I did raise the specter that it did appear to me that Dingy Harry got beat up. I don't know by who, although I might now. Bottom line is, I might now know who did it. And I wasn't even gonna bring this up.
DeleteCan you guess why, other than Reid’s rather ragged appearance, that he speculated that Reid ‘might’ have gotten beaten up? … hint… it was over another story that Reid told both to the press and on the Senate floor, run with by all things liberal and to this date absolutely unproven …
I guess in fairness I should add one thing... amazingly from Salon, they asked a couple of financial experts if Reids story had legs and they told Salon... "probibly not."
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI guess to complete my thoughts on the subject and the fairness of Salon, while they did actually print the 'probably not' bit... that hasn't stopped them from continuing to run articles on Romney not proving the allegations wrong instead of attacking read for making unsubstantiated allegations.... Interestingly enough, if you follow Salons timeline on article since Reid decided to declare that Romney hadn't paid any taxes for 10 years but the ran an article about a tax return where Romney purposefully declined to take a deduction so he could inflate the percentage of taxes that he paid....
DeleteIntegrity....
Yeah but I acknowledged in advance that I'm sure there are lefty sources willing to run salacious bullshit without ensuring it's true. That's not the main point for me. As I have said many many times, the lightning bolt that struck me while devouring Ayn Rand was that human nature is such that integrity will almost always be cast aside in order to obtain some financial or power gain. Cable news, talk radio and internet content sites have become billion dollar industries and even when they are mostly telling the truth, they are often presenting the news in a way that is intellectually dishonest.
DeleteIntegrity exists in the world, but it frequently seems to exist in an inverse relationship with power. The left and right media would not report salacious bullshit if their audience did not clamor for it. THIS is the problem with the thinking that if we would all just become superbrains, we would hold everyone accountable via the invisible hand of the market. Real life doesn't work that way.
Real life doesn't work that way
DeleteI would just simply have to ask.... How do you know? Have you, in your lifetime or in the run of progressive politics of the last 100 years seen anything that comes close to resembling the free market?
@TS
DeleteThe Internet. Though that's about to change.
Well… except for the fees, restrictions, regulations and controls set on that piece of copper which delivers that broadband to your home… the rules and regulations for the manifacture and use of the equipment that bring it to your home... And the hiring practices that doesn’t allow you to actually interview a prospective employee… or that ability to turn away business based on you own personal beliefs… or the forced wage you must pay for people who are only marginal to your business plan.. Yeah, beyond that the internet has been free market… :-)
DeleteHi phunky! You don't grace us with your insight nearly as much as you should... where on earth do you go?.... you have a life you say?
Hiya TS, howya doin'? :-)
DeleteI was talking about the end user. The only fee they pay is to the privately owned ISPs that give them access to the web. Granted, the taxes and whatnot may be included in that monthly charge, but to the end user that's irrelevant. $40 a month for web access is $40 a month whether all that money goes to the ISP or a percentage of it goes to taxes. And no, I don't think the ISPs would charge less if those taxes suddenly disappeared. They will charge the maximum they can get away with charging - the max that the market will support. Econ 101.
The truly free market aspect of the Net was the pure competition that it allows. On a previous thread about Net Neutrality, I cited the example of MySpace beating out Friendster, which in turn was crushed by Facebook.
For a $40 per month access fee, you can create a multi-billion dollar company from your dorm room simply by building a better product/service than your competition in a market that is largely unregulated.
That is as close to a pure free market as you're gonna get in a modern economy.
Wellll… Technically you are pretty close to right except for a little thing called ‘network management’. When the internet was almost exclusively page delivery the prices that customers paid allowed ISPs to build out at a rate that was at least equal to the traffic that went through it. With every new customer came some expanded capacity so if you ran an online catalogue sale, you could pretty will expand as much as you wanted.
DeleteBut then, you decided to sell… music. So now your business forced more traffic through the ISP’s than your subscriber fee covered… internet companies began throttling traffic in peak times so that everyone had access. Your business suffered, you took the ISP to court and lost. The ISP talked about tiered services… they lost in the court of public net neutrality opinion and have raised their subscriber fees about as high as the market will tolerate keeping in mind that the vast majority of people still only used the internet for page content information…
Of course your music business is hampered by the throttled speeds and you can’t buy faster access even if you wanted to. Your ‘free market’ days are slightly more restricted.
Then came the game changer…. Streaming content…. Can’t throttle it… the only way to handle it is to build out the network to deliver it… you have since changed your business model to include interactive games which you sell at a very attractive price; business is booming… you are doing wonderful… the ISP on the other hand is no longer part of a free market economy…The government said so...
Of course you are right about one thing... if you stick to creating a better page oriented business... the people who are forcing ISP expansion via government intervention are propping up your business capacity just fine.
You're right TS, and I agree. As I stated, the what the internet was in it's 1st 2 decades is about to change.
DeleteHere's a link to the Net Neutrality thread from November with an exchange between me, Max and William that outlines my thoughts if you're interested:
http://mwamericanpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/11/net-neutrality-right-out-of-fdr.html
Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and farther back, Edward R. Murrow, Gabriel Heater and J. B. Kaltenborne , reminds me of why I don't watch the national news on TV or listen on the radio.
ReplyDeleteSorry, that should be J. P. Kaltenborn
DeleteI forgot Walter Winchell, "Hello mister and misses America and all the ships at sea".
DeleteI liked Paul Harvey. I remember his commentary when I was young listening on crackley AM radio. Conservative though he was, his logic spoke to most everyone.... well, except for those who he called out...
DeleteLynne Harvey, his wife, was the first producer ever inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame and produced his 'For the rest of the story’ program she was also instrumental in establishing the 10pm news slot adopted by all the networks.
“Paul Harvey... good day!”