People are rarely people, my friend
by digby
Wow, Romney’s media strategist and top surrogate is a truly perfect example of everything that’s destroying journalism and politics. He’s also a perfect adviser for the cruel, practical jokester, Mitt Romney:
Eric Fehrnstrom began to panic when he landed on Sanibel Island off Florida’s Gulf Coast in December 1989. Fehrnstrom, a scandal-sniffing veteran reporter for the Boston Herald, the then-Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, was on a juicy story he knew had page one potential. It might even, as he would later describe it, become a “kill shot.”
With Massachusetts in a fiscal free fall, the lieutenant governor, Evelyn Murphy, had jetted down to the island for a short vacation. If Fehrnstrom could find her, the story of an out-of-touch politician would write itself. But out in the island heat, away from the smoky cocoon of the fourth-floor statehouse press room, “Fernie,” as he was known, wasn’t so sure he could land his prey.
He had a lot of beach to cover and no addresses for Murphy. “I thought it was crazy,” recalled Michael Fein, a Herald photographer who accompanied Fehrnstrom. “We were lost as to what we were going to do.”
A day into their search, they were no closer to finding Murphy. If it’s possible to feel despair on a tropical island, they found it driving around in their rental car, Fein told The Huffington Post. They began to question and debate their strategy. And pray for luck. It was then that they spotted Murphy jogging past the palm fronds along West Gulf Drive.
Shaking off their disbelief, they sped far enough ahead for Fein to jump out and find a hiding place behind a bush. “I had a long lens,” he said. “I was just like, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable.'” They got their kill shot. “The next day, we splashed her picture across page one, her middle-aged thighs flouncing across more than 300,000 newspapers,” Fehrnstrom boasted in a subsequent Boston Magazine essay. The next time Fein saw Murphy, he said he felt the need to explain that he was just doing his job and that he hoped there were no hard feelings.
Not Fernie. He had, after all, effectively reduced an accomplished female politician contemplating a run for governor to one unflattering picture and was proud of the tabloid accomplishment. A decade later, he began his Boston Magazine piece recounting his Sanibel scoop. And it wasn’t really his. After all, he didn’t snap the picture.
“In my trade, politics was never personal. Hell, people were rarely people — they were ducks in a shooting gallery,” he wrote. On his triumphant return from Sanibel, he recalled in the piece, “I was greeted with the highest praise in tabloid journalism: ‘Nice hit.’”
I’m pretty sure that R & R agree with him on all counts. We’re all just ducks in a shooting gallery.
Read the whole thing at Huffington Post. It’s a fascinating portrait of a real asshole.
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