Immediately after the election in 2004, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, the president of ABC News, and Tina Brown, from her now long-since-canceled CNBC show (subscription required, but this gives you the gist of things):
RUSH: So, anyway, she’s got David Westin on the program, and she says, “David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?” She’s talking about the red states of America here, folks. “Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?”
WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.
RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.
While we’re waiting for those foreign correspondents to don their Willis & Geiger safari jackets and grab their Shure SM-58s and minicams, Robert Ferrigno, found via Mark Steyn, has an excellent suggestion for an ambassador to lead them into the vast unknown that is the American Heartland.
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