How To Be A Hack

Glenn Reynolds, 2/11/07 (i.e. 3 days after this was released to the public): “I think it’s legitimate, and partly because it was in the week when she was coming out and making a very big deal on global warming. The plane that she originally had requested was actually a military version of a 757 airliner. And her staff said she wanted to have room for an “entourage,” which was perhaps an unfortunate choice of word.”

See, an ordinary hack would just say Pelosi requested something she didn’t request, several days after proof that no such thing occurred (which was sufficiently unrefuted that the White House said it was a non-story) was released. The kind of hack who can get on CNN on Sundays will actually invent content for the fictitious request. Let that be a lesson to you!

…as a couple of commenters pointed out, it’s imprecise to say that Reynolds personally “invented” the smear. My guess is that he was vaguely remembering this now-discredited Washington Times story. Leaving aside the obvious facts that 1)”if an anonymous source said it in a fifth-rate newspaper, it must be true!” is an amusing standard for an anti-Emm Ess Emm crusader and 2)there are rather obvious logical difficulties with making claims about specific wording about a request that anybody even minimally familiar with the facts would know never existed, you’ll notice that even the Times never said specifically that “her staff used the word”–the word was used to describe her claims by the source. As far as I can tell, the embellishment is Reynolds’s own.