Watching rebroadcast of Rachel's show about today's parallels to McCarthy [View all]

[halfulglas]

What she isn't saying is that during the early 50s the Washington press corps had a reputation as hanging around drinking while trying to get a story to file before deadlines. And supposedly whether it was McCarthy or someone pushing his buttons he drank with the reporters and knew their deadlines so he knew exactly when to make the announcements that would grab the headlines because he did it right before deadline filing. The point is the reporters all knew McCarthy was a piece of crap and his "facts" were also complete crap but they were lazy and they had an easy story to file with their papers back home. Who cared if it was true? And McCarthy made headline after headline and careers and lives were ruined because reporters were unwilling to say the junior senator from Wisconsin was lying.

I just can't help but ruminate all these many years later the press was completely carried away by hysteria over a supposed "scandal" over a bunch of emails and even the supposedly "paper of record" got caught up in "exclusives" on that score. Not to mention Benghazi. I'm not saying they could have ignored the frenzy, but even the so called "great" papers jumped for the easy headline and story.