Packer and Blair are instances of people who like to see their name in the paper. Blair went so far as to actually worm his way onto the staff, but when you listen to the noises he makes, his motivations are not all that different from Packer's. He just loved waking up in the morning to see those Jayson Blair bylines on the front page of the New York Times. Where Greg Packer would place himself where he knew he could get interviewed, Blair made stuff up to make sure his stories would get placed. This "Wilkinson" character sounds to me like the same kind of guy, except he got his jollies being taken seriously by Important People. To get into the room with the Big Shots, he would make up any damned thing: CIA agent, NSA spook, former Green Beret... who knows what else he's told other people over the years. There are thousands of such people out there. In any society with 300 million people, you're going to get some nuts of every kind. Seymour Hersh is a guy who probably has four or five of these clowns feeding him absolute crap. He has no clue. Robert Novak probably has some. Every one of these well-known pundits and reporters is a target for this kind of nut. We may have even had our own right here on FR, the mysterious Quidam. Our media could be full of quotations from absolute frauds. What makes Doug Thompson so special that he's the only guy who has collected one of these bogus 'experts' among his trusted sources? I'll bet journalism is full of them. Matt Drudge probably gets 50 emails a week from 'secret whistleblowers' telling him the inside scoop from deep inside the Pentagon or the White House... all of it crap. But you can bet that there are one or two that he's never published, but that have been right about a couple of things, and if they keep that up, one of these days.... One would like to think that the Jayson Blair thing scared the bejeezus out of editors across the country. If it could happen at the New York Times, they probably have one or two in their place. And now they need to start looking for this, too. My fear is that because Capitol Hill Blue is not exactly the epitome of mainstream journalism, the story of what happened here could sink before it has a chance to do some good. Doug Thompson knows far better than I where the platforms are where he should be screaming about this, but I hope he will do so. There's no reason to believe that he's the only person in journalism that has a publicity-seeking nut in his Rolodex. |
My sense is that the Jayson Blair fiasco, the Capitol Hill Blue fiasco, and Ann Coulter's discovery of the amazing Man-On-Every-Street, one Greg Packer, might be the opening bars of a very long symphony.