WHO IS LARA JAKES JORDAN?

She's the Santorum hit "reporter"/activist. Bryan covered her bias and close proximity to the now notorious Santorum-hater, Teresa Heinz Kerry, in an earlier post but here's more details:

For starters, she is married to veteran Democratic Party operative Jim Jordan, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and manager of Sen. John Kerry's presidential bid.

Not surprisingly, the Massachusetts Democrat was among the first to criticize Santorum's remarks, using it as an opportunity to attack the White House. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Kerry got an advance copy of the article given his connections.

But there's more to the Lara Jakes Jordan story.

In January of this year, Mrs. Jordan was one of the signatories on a letter to her bosses at the AP attacking the news organization for "rolling back diversity" by not extending benefits to domestic partners.

In a symbolic move, the signatories to the letter returned key chains AP management gave them to "celebrate" its corporate diversity. The key chains carried the slogan: "AP Diversity: Many Views, One Vision.

It seems Mrs. Jordan's ideological fervor is not reserved only for her private life and her corporate politicking. This woman clearly ambushed Santorum on an issue near and dear to her bleeding heart.

I've been in the daily news business for 25 years. When I got started a quarter century ago, there was an old newsroom saying that went like this: "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus."

Mrs. Jordan violated that old newsroom ethic. She abdicated her right to cover the circus because she was sleeping with an elephant – or, in this case, a donkey.

That's why I say these catcalls for the head of Rick Santorum are nothing more than a political sideshow. It's not Rick Santorum who should be forced from office for clearly stating views that have been considered mainstream for the last 5,000 years. It's Lara Jakes Jordan who should be drummed out of the news profession for scoring cheap political points under the guise of news reporting.

Now all someone has to do is reveal how close Lara Jakes Jordan and Teresa Heinz Kerry have been recently. My hunch is that Teresa encouraged Lara to conduct the hit on Santorum. From the same article:

It was a set-up. It was what we call in the news business a "hatchet job." Rick Santorum is a young, good-looking, articulate conservative in the Senate's Republican leadership. He was deliberately targeted by a political activist disguised as a reporter – Lara Jakes Jordan.

I invite you to read her original story and see for yourself how it is dripping in venom. It's an editorial camouflaged as a news story. And she wrote it for the largest and most powerful news-gathering operation in the world, ensuring it would get maximum play in newspapers throughout the world.

This is why it's critical that bloggers think before they post -- even if it's just a few minutes spent analyzing the tone of a "report." Don't get used by the mainstream press. Subvert it. The AP is still hoping to create the Trent Lott "weblog effect," but they failed already. Some bloggers early on played right along with the mainstream media script -- essentially just spreading a rumor. Here's one litmus test: If anyone still maintains Santorum "equated" homosexuals with ________ they are a blithering idiot and need to apologize to regain credibility. George Will faced three such fools on ABC's This Week Sunday. He was a man among fetuses, intellectually speaking. Santorum really didn't even "compare" sodomy with ________ either, but that's a finer point involving context and logical fallacy.