Wolf Pack Journalism

   City vacationer to farmer: "This mule won't move when I tell him to."
   Farmer picks up a large stick, raps the mule hard on the head, and says "Giddyup."
   At that, the mule starts to move as the farmer reminds the vacationer: 
  "You wanna tell him something, you gotta get his attention first."

   Far too often, public figures in America go on their merry way, doing whatever they choose to do, and there are few consequences.
   Until.

   Until they do something that's so juicy, so egregious, and/or so easy to write about or comment on that many in the media pile on, just as wolves in a pack focus on the one creature in the herd that shows a weakness.
   Reporters may win prizes for what's called "enterprise journalism," but the reality is that many if not most reporters are lazy, and follow the herd until they see a weakness.
   Part of that is practicality. Readers accept what they already believe. People act on what they believe, regardless of fact or reality. They accept as true that which they already believe.
   Or, as the fictional Chester A. Reilly said in the early radio comedy, "My head's made up. You can't confuse me with the facts."

   So it is with American political figures and others in the public eye. The kind of political back-stabbing evidenced in the New Jersey bridge shutdown just happened to be more egregious than most Garden State political dirty tricks. And it wasn't until a determined reporter for a local newspaper broke the story that other media picked it up, finding other politicians who were willing to be quoted in the attack pack, and the story got legs, so to speak. It now has been dominating the national news for weeks, even though the bridge access lane shutdown happened last September.

   Why didn't the news media catch the story earlier? One could say it wasn't ripe. One could say reporters were focusing on bigger stories. After all, there's only room on Page One for seven to nine stories on any one day, and reporters strive for Page One stories. One could cite many possible reasons why the story didn't break until months later. But the story did, eventually, break, and it only took one reporter to start what became a media frenzy.

   Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post worked on the Watergate story for months before it was finally picked up by Walter Cronkite for the CBS Evening News. It was then that the journalistic wolves saw the weakness and closed in, abetted by opportunistic politicians, and President Richard M. Nixon fell from office.

   The Watergate break-in was a relatively minor operation perpetrated by what was called the Department of Dirty Tricks in the re-election campaign. It, too, was unnecessary, since there was little doubt of Nixon's return to office.

   Moreover, political dirty tricks are not limited to one party or one level of government. National escapades get more ink and air time, and state level shenanigans rise to that level of exposure only if the central figure -- a governor, for example -- has national aspirations.
   Morality, like the parrot's plumage made famous by Monty Python, don't enter into it.