Albert Eisele gets it wrong in so Many Ways

In case you don't know, Albert Eisele is the editor of the The Hill, the newspaper which recently quoted Helen Thomas claiming (in a fit of hyperbole) that she would kill herself if Dick Cheney ever ran for president.

Today, Eisele published an explanation which, like the original piece, was run on Drudge.

Though I found the piece informative; it was irritating in two different respects.

First:

"Little did I know, being a creature of the typewriter/telegraph era of journalism, that cybergossip Matt Drudge would pounce on the item and transmit it to the farthest regions of the Internet universe, along with an unflattering photograph of Ms. Thomas."

Come on, Eisele! Drudge has only been doing his thing for nearly a decade now. If I had a dollar for every supposedly professional journalist who wrote "I never expected Drudge to pick it up", I'd be able to pay for high speed internet access without messing with the family budget. If it never occurred to Eisele that somebody outside the beltway might pick up some story he posted on the internet, then he needs to retire. Yesterday.

Further, one might think a publisher would like having something he wrote transmitted "to the farthest regions of the Internet universe."

Second:

"That was all Drudge acolytes needed to unleash a flood of e-mails condemning her — and me, as her unwitting accomplice."

No. No. No.

Nobody in the United States mistook Eisele for Helen Thomas' accomplice. Everybody reading the story knew quite well that Eisele's quote from Thomas was about as flattering as a pic of John Kerry in a bunny suit.

And nobody condemned Helen Thomas. People laughed at her, mocked her, giggled at her, made cracks about her. But nobody condemned her for her comments. Don't get me wrong. Helen Thomas has been frequently condemned. But it has been for all her biased reporting and antagonistic deportment towards Republican administration officials in the White House press room. The people who giggled at Thomas were certainly not the same folks who sent hate mail to Eisele for publishing the quote

The people who sent any hate mail to Eisele were the ones who liked Helen Thomas. They sent the mail because they felt Eisele had betrayed Thomas, not been her accomplice.

Furthermore, the Drudge acolytes, as Eisele calls them, were not the ones who sent the nasty-grams to Eisele. The Drudge acolytes (myself included) were the ones who loved the quote, and republished it, and satirized it. The reason is, most Drudge readers tend to lean conservative and know very well that Helen Thomas hasn't given a Republican President an even break in decades.

It's the libs who attacked Eisele, because he embarrassed one of their icons. And most of the people who did condemn Eisele almost certainly picked up the Thomas story fourth hand, from Eisele to Drudge to some smart aleck blogger like me and then to angry lib.

When Helen Thomas made her embarrassing quote the other day, she wasn't the only fool involved in that interview.