Here's a little something to kick off today's afternoon open thread: RedState.com's Leon Wolf has an interesting metaphor for what animals the liberal media are most like.
Wolf argues that, yes, of course the media tend to be liberal but their cardinal sin, regardless of their beat, is laziness, both in work ethic and the thinking of original thoughts (emphases mine):
They have, for the most part, the mentality of birds. Have you ever seen birds who are taking a rest during a migration? They will all stop on the same section of telephone wire. One of them will see something on the ground and fly down to the ground. The rest of the whole flock will then fly to the ground just to see what the other was looking at. When one of them flies back up to the wire, the rest follow. Blazing a trail is inimical to their species. It's much easier just to follow the good story everyone else has dug up than to go out there and find your own, and so the media never does.
As a result, huge, glaring and obvious problems with stories go completely under the radar for reasons that have nothing to do with bias. For instance, former Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy finalist Manti Te'o told a story about a girlfriend who was dying for an entire year and no one from the media ever even thought to themselves, "Hey, I bet it would make a great story if we talked to this girlfriend directly," until Deadspin blew the lid off the entire media by proving that she did not even exist.
What was the groundbreaking, back-breaking work Deadspin reporters did to uncover this bombshell? They called Stanford to see if this alleged person existed. That's it. When it turned out she didn't, they did a news search to see if she was ever born and it turns out she wasn't. This isn't Pulitzer material here, folks. But it exposes how easy for a huge, juicy piece of low-hanging fruit to go completely unpicked by the media simply due to their laziness.
On the other hand, if you find yourself the target of the media with their bird brains it can be a terrifying experience. And right now, Ben Carson is facing the fact that the flock has descended on his autobiography. They're not going to leave until they've picked the bones clean.
You can read the full post here.
