The Political Whore

I couldn’t have said it any better than Eric Boehlert did:

The idea that the Matthews live-mic “Oh God” utterance should be pounced on as an “aha” moment for the unprofessional press corps is absurd. Not when Rick Santelli, a reporter for CNBC, went on live TV and uncorked an anti-Obama rant and then paraded around on right-wing radio shows for days while concocting stories about being targeted by the White House.

Despite crossing all normal bounds of journalism, Santelli was celebrated in the press as a populist. (Y’know, the Drexel Burnham Lambert kind.) And CNBC seemed to do everything it could to market and hype the rant. (Imagine if MSNBC replayed Matthews’ “Oh God” clip incessantly, bragging about how Matthews had “touched a nerve” with Americans.)

In terms of revealing deep truths about the corporate media, I’d suggest Santelli’s off-kilter tirade, followed by his puffed-up prancing around, and the press corps that cheered him on, told us a helluva lot more abut the press than did Matthews’ split-second “Oh God” utterance.

Read the entire article on HuffPo.

Are we witnessing the birth of a new Lou Dobbs, or is the viral emergence of Rick Santelli on the mortgage assistance plan just a casw of the upper-class twits being openly pissed at the lower-class dummies?

Or is it worse: another example of how Web 2.0 endlessly recycles anything that has the same rubber-necking appeal as a good interstate highway car crash? (Let’s not forget that some of the most consistently popular online videos features kitties.)

By now it is pretty safe to say you cannot have missed the hubub about CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli inducing a “riot” on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. OK, it wasn’t a riot, it was a few traders who are doing OK financially, as is Santelli, all bitching about the mortgage assistance plan announced by President Barack Obama this week.

Viral Video Chart says the Santelli Tea Party clip has been added to 255 blogs (256 as soon as I hit the publish button) and had more than 220,000 views in the past day.

Let’s go to the video for those who missed it and those who can’t get enough of it.

The Columbia Journalism Review, natch, displays its disapproval:

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