"What we have here is a case of a lazy reporter being burned by a fellow Democrat who told her, probably as a lark, that he was a Republican..."

Lawyer blatantly fools journalist into featuring him in her article, and she can't back down. The anecdote was so perfect. Just the hook she needed wanted for her article on the Democratic presidential candidates addressing a group of trial lawyers.

Here, the journalist, Jennifer Hunter, fights back, complaining about being "harassed" by "irate Republicans":

The grumbling arose partially because my editor took a small part of my story and made it into a headline: "GOP lawyer sold on Dems." Reporters don't write headlines, editors do. And they want to write something catchy so readers will read the darned story.

The story was not about the GOP lawyer; it was about the speeches five Democratic presidential candidates gave to a convention of trial lawyers...

The final kicker for all you Republicans who read my column with a magnifying glass is...

Boldface added. The article is 17 short paragraphs. The first 4 paragraphs and the last 2 paragraphs are devoted to the supposedly "staunch Republican," Jim Ronca. How is he "a small part" of the story that you'd need "a magnifying glass" to find? It was more than a third of the article.

It's like "fake but accurate." Even if Ronca wasn't a staunch Republican who'd fallen out of love with Republican politicians, he stood for all those other staunch Republicans who've fallen out of love with Republican politicians, and Hunter needed to quote someone like that to frame her story about the various candidate speeches so she could to produce a conventionally lame mainstream piece about candidate speeches, so why is everyone making such a big deal about it? My critics are all... grrrrrr..... staunch Republicans!!!!