'Cracked.com is the 'Paper' of Record'

As Kathy Shaidle once wrote, “It’s come to this: Cracked.com is the ‘paper’ of record.” But that’s only because the original news sources of record long ago abrogated their jobs.

Get a load of this item in Cracked on how the legacy media botched their coverage of the Tea Party, as spotted by Aaron Worthing at Patterico’s blog:

For all those wackjob birthers captured on film wearing frilly lady blouses and triangle hats, there were thousands of ordinary people just living their lives, being regular, and not liking how their Republican Party had turned out. And even though Tea Party members tend to skew toward older, middle-class white guys, their overall demographics aren’t that far from the rest of the country. Of course, regular people are about as riveting as dry toast, so they didn’t get much screen time. Which is why it came as such a shock to everyone when 32 percent of Tea Party-affiliated candidates won their elections.

By focusing in on the a–clowns the media painted a picture that not only wasn’t accurate, but pretty much made constructive political discourse impossible. They didn’t just fail to do their job — they did the opposite of their job, and they’ve been doing it for years….

So when we watched coverage of O’Donnell and the Tea Party this year, we were only getting the bonkers half of the picture. Now that CNN is teaming up with the Tea Party Express to host the Republican debates next year, we’ll probably see a lot fewer costumed revolutionaries. But everyone will just assume the Tea Party cleaned up its act, when in reality it will be CNN.

That remains to be seen. After well over a decade of Epic Fail from CNN, between falling in love with every tin-hatted radical chic dictator they laid eyes on, and then clearing a path for Obama in 2008 — both by tossing Rev. Wright down the memory hole, and by sabotaging the GOP-YouTube debate, verify and only then trust warily.