Dear Mr. Brooks: I am so sorry to make money off of your misery, Jon Ralston
To be honest, I'm not following the Rep. Steven Brooks saga all that closely. But when a duly elected state representative is accused of trying to kill the leader of his party over legislative assignments -- and when police call on him they find a loaded pistol and ammo in his possession -- that is by all definition "news."
And every news organization in Las Vegas covered it, as they should.
What's become a bizarre sidebar to the Brooks story comes now from local political reporter/opinioniator/
He says he only realized this when he a read a story in the Review-Journal, which happens to be his chief competitor to his paid website for political news.
"It was only after the RJ’s Ben Spillman published that interview with Brooks – and the 'newspaper' inexplicably blew that picture up, even offering it for sale – that I realized just how spiraling out of control Brooks -- and the story – were. It’s time to apply the brakes, slow down and assess the human carnage here ..."
That's a curious observation. Jon Ralston had no second thoughts about how he covered and advanced the story. But now, he says that his competitor has gone too far by "inexplicably" blowing up a picture of Brooks (stop by the paper one day, bub, we'll try to explain how we "blow up" pictures) and that his sources and contacts who gave him info on Brooks "should start behaving more like human beings than posterior-protecting, pussillanimous weasels."
"This is a human being," Ralston has suddenly realized, "and whatever his past behavior, what he needs now is treatment and support."
Oh happy day! Jon Ralston has realized that Rep. Brooks -- a man obviously agitated and perhaps dangerously obsessed with killing a fellow legislator, is a human being, too.
But the truth is that Ralston doesn't think Brooks is a human being in need to help. Brooks is only a meal ticket for Jon Ralston.
That's why on Monday when Ralston reprinted a letter for his readers in which Rep. Kelvin Atkinson sought to "clarify" what he said and did regarding the Brooks arrest, Ralston added that "(by the way, folks, premium subscribers to (my website) had this information 24 hours ago."
Cha-ching!
