Why Does the Media Not Doing Even the Most Basic Due Diligence?

So, the news media is reporting how the Occupy movement is starting a super PAC.

Yeah, bull sh%$. It turns out that in the space of a few minutes, with the aid of Google you can find that the person behind it is a fanatic Ron Paul supporter with a history of severe mental illness:

Last week, several news organizations carried a story about an alleged Occupy PAC that, if true, would have driven another stake of political cynicism in the heart of the fractured movement, built on idealism and opposition to the corruption of American politics.

Paperwork for the PAC was filed with the FEC by 32-year-old John Paul Thornton of Decatur, Alabama, who says he was inspired by Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC. Mother Jones reported that “[u]nlike Colbert’s Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, though, Thornton says in his first interview on the subject that OWS PAC is no joke.” Meanwhile, The Atlantic Wire wrote that the organization was specifically registered as a “SuperPAC” that could raise unlimited amounts of funds that Thornton intended to funnel to “federal candidates pledging to get money out of politics, including Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.”

There’s only one problem: The alleged “Occupy PAC” story isn’t at all what it seems, and had any of the reporters who first “broke” it last week bothered applying a little professional skepticism, the story never would have got off the ground, and never would have created yet another layer of disillusionment and cynicism that Occupy’s enemies have been actively sowing.

There many obvious warning signs about Thornton on the public record. For example, John Thornton admitted to a reporter from Capital New York that he was a Ron Paul supporter. You don’t have to be a veteran journalist to know that a guy who supports a far-right Republican libertarian who wants to abolish financial regulations and laws protecting labor and the environment, and favors Citizens United and unregulated lobbying, isn’t exactly representative of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Being a Ron Paul supporter in Occupy is one thing; it’s another thing altogether when a libertarian sets up a SuperPAC in Occupy’s name.

………

According to newspaper accounts, Thornton lost his defense-contracting job in the summer of 2008, after a violent psychotic episode landed him a criminal conviction and a nearly two-month jail sentence. His parents said that Thornton, who was 28 at the time, started losing his mind after getting out of the National Guard. And after string of run-ins with law, which included the violation of a protection order filed by his ex-wife, a judge sentenced him to 60 days in the tank.

The kicker here is that Breitbart actually scooped the reporters on the fact that this guy is a Paulite nut job, because it makes good copy for him, and it syncs with his goal of sliming the Occupy movement.

The more conspiratorially minded of you might think that this is something from the corporate task-master, but the reporter who broke this was Andy Kroll of Mother Jones, and while Mother Jones may be a number of things (after all, they fired Michael Moore, and had to settle out of court for wrongful termination),. they are not a corporate mouthpiece.

This just a lazy sloppy reporters who saw a story with some pop to it, and decided that it was easier to write the story without doing any leg work.

Unfortunately, this is the rule, rather than the exception.