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Now what I am NOT saying is that this is an absolute certainty. It's just a tabloid. But I can tell you that, when I worked at the AP, we had a complimentary subscription and it was grabbed and poured over the minute it came in the front door. From the chief news guy in the newsroom on down to individual writers. And there were stories, from O.J. to Michael Jackson, where they were consistently spot-on, and consistently ahead of everybody else.
I think it's mainly for one reason, which separates the tabloid world from such straight-ahead outfits as the Associated Press - the tabs pay for news. They think nothing of it. They do it all the time, and they have tentacles everywhere, because EVERYBODY wants to pick up a few extra bucks from time to time. So they get a lot of tips. They even put in little blurbs here and there in each issue, promoting this - "Got a hot tip?" And the better the tip, the more they pay. The AP and other such organizations do not pay for news. It's policy. You are apt to get pretty much the whole gamut of stuff, which is why they DO have large staffs that check out the tips. But a lot of 'em have some truth to 'em.
If this is starting to pop up in the tabloids, it suggests two things:
One - The taboo is lifted. Funny enough, back in the day, a couple of the tabs published photos of Drunk and Disorderly - the bush twins - drunk and disorderly at parties and bars, funny enough the photographer who shot those photos gets an anthrax letter - and the rest is history. About that same time we'd just gone through something as a nation called "9/11" and everybody was scared stiff. The thing to do was shut up and get behind the pResident and that's what everybody did, and never was heard a discouraging word. And so it remained. But that's faded. With the incompetence (I think Katrina punched America in the nose with that one) and the lies (that continue to come out every day) and the worsening situation in Iraq that doesn't match the rhetoric farting out of the White House asshole on a regular basis. At one time, one did not DARE write, broadcast, or publish this. Comedians now will widely concur that they didn't even dare make political jokes back then. You just did not dare. It was taboo. Well, things change.
And Two - There's possibly a bit of truth in there. Maybe it's just grown harder and harder to keep a lid on, maybe those charged with keeping that lid on are just tired of the constant effort to do so, or maybe some underling of theirs is and therein lies the source of the leaks and tips to the tabs. MAYBE somebody in there is a soul on the verge of being saved - conscience just bothering them a little too much anymore. It might be that SOMETHING has been going on for long enough that the principals and those around them have just grown sloppy. That same ethic is in play elsewhere when you see the outrage of various of these same principals - who now get testy on camera when they're challenged. How DARE anybody challenge them? They're just spoiled because they're so used to getting away with it that they don't want to have to answer for anything now. They're too busy expecting more of their birthright - doing whatever they damned well please and never getting called on it. They're too used to getting away with it, riding the perfect wave of that taboo in the above paragraph. That wave has petered out. Conditions simply aren't the same now as they were back then.
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