Huffington Magazine Issue 41 | Page 70

BEYOND HOOKERS, HAMAS AND HAGEL Journolist, a private listserv of liberal bloggers, policy wonks and political journalists which this reporter first profiled in 2009. The Daily Caller reported last year that now former Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) hadn’t lived in the state for more than 30 years and, just last month, that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) will get a primary challenger. But such reporting has been overshadowed by The Daily Caller’s more sensational stories over the past year, such as one featuring a cache of tweets from Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager shot dead while walking home from a convenience store. MSNBC host and former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough blasted conservative media at the time for trolling Martin’s social media history “to find ominous looking pictures” of the dead teenager. In October, The Daily Caller published a 2007 video of thenSen. Obama giving a rousing speech at Hampton University, a historically black college, in which he criticized the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The Drudge Report teased the story and Carlson appeared the same night on Fox News’ Hannity to discuss HUFFINGTON 03.24.13 “ … FIRST OFF, REPORTERS ARE OFTEN LAZY. SECOND, REPORTERS NATURALLY LEAN LEFT POLITICALLY.” what was promoted as a racially charged speech finally unearthed. But while the entire speech was never published online or aired in full during the 2008 presidential campaign, numerous media outlets — including Carlson’s former MSNBC program — had covered excerpts of it, which led to ample mockery of The Daily Caller’s story as old news. Andrew Sullivan went a step further, calling Carlson a “racist demagogue” for hyping the speech anew. “No one had seen it before because it had never aired before. Period,” Carlson told The Huffington Post. “We were attacked by Sam Feist, the Washington bureau