We skeptics, however, are left to wonder about those “warning signs” that Barstow amassed so conveniently on Page One. Did they present themselves to Barstow the reporter, unbidden but repeatedly, during his five months of snooping, or did he go looking for them and, having plucked them from a welter of reportorial detail, assign them a salience to fit neatly into his narrative? The dateline alone suggests a put-up job. Sandpoint has no particular significance for the vast majority of Tea Partiers, who are, after all, found in every corner of the country and more likely to don Old Navy than camo. The journalistic premise was that something spooky, something Aryan-like, was going on out there, just below the surface palaver about big government and property rights. That’s why the editors had to call in the boys from CSI: TIU—this was too big for ordinary reporting. And the premise became the conclusion.
Read the rest of the Andrew Ferguson article here.
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