Remember in the early days of blogging when reporters would dismiss our work as nothing more than a bunch of people sitting at their computers in their pajamas expropriating journalists’ work? We weren’t doing the hard work of true professionals, who would dig up resources and conduct tough interviews before writing exposes of how things really were.
Fast forward to Monday, when we find this article in The Washington Post.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was bullish in laying out his agenda for the new Congress with Republicans in control of the House.
And how did writer Philip Rucker know this?
Issa, who as chairman will have subpoena power, said he will seek to ferret out waste across the federal bureaucracy. While he used fiery rhetoric in describing the Obama administration in a series of television interviews Sunday, he said he will focus on wasteful spending, not the prosecution of White House officials. [emphasis added]
To be fair, it wasn’t quite a rewrite of a GOP press release. He had Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland give the rebuttal from a transcript of Cummings’ appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
But Mr. Rucker was busy working for this report. Apparently even going so far as to change the station!
"I think [Attorney General Eric Holder] needs to realize that, for example, WikiLeaks, if the president says, ‘I can’t deal with this guy as a terrorist,’ then he has to be able to deal with him as a criminal," Issa said on "Fox News Sunday." "Otherwise, the world is laughing at this paper tiger we’ve become.
Mr. Rucker may have received overtime or hazardous duty pay. He actually watch a third TV program, quoting Issa from his CBS interview Sunday.
This entire article was written based on two Congressmen’s Sunday TV interviews.
Mr. Rucker was able to write this entire story by watching TV, probably while in his pajamas. This one was literally “phoned in.”