And at the end of the piece [Novak] writes::
“Schachte said he never has been contacted by or talked to anybody in the Bush-Cheney campaign or any Republican organization. He said he has been a political independent who votes for candidates of both parties.” Apparently, he’s the kind of independent who gave George W. Bush a thousand bucks in 2000 and in 2004. He’s also the new law partner of one of the guys running the Republican National Convention.
As I’ve said before, I think, I got out of journalism years ago, and one of the reasons I didn’t like it was all the fact-checking and due diligence: I wasn’t trained in the field so I was picking it all up on the job and I found it was hard work. At the time, I lacked the perseverance to keep asking “why” until I ran out of things to question. Now, I see that if I have just held on, I could have gotten a job at any large media outlets and never worried about facts or intellectual curiousity again. In the case of far too many big league reporters, taking things at face value seems to be par for the course. They never suspect they’re being spun or even flat out lied to: they just write it up and file it.
In this case, Novak could have gotten an intern to look into this if he felt it was beneath him: the facts were there.