Remember that “could Obama’s skinniness be a liability?” story from Friday’s Wall Street Journal? The one about which Megan wrote, “No, this isn’t from The Onion“? The one in which the reporter, Amy Chozick, managed to find both a “housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas” who voted for Clinton in the primary and “a Clinton supporter” on a “Yahoo! politics message board” to prop up her premise? (Both of whom Maureen Dowd then quoted in her New York Times column yesterday to help prop up her premise that “Some Hillary gals are still turned off by ‘beanpole guy'” — “beanpole guy” being what the Yahoo! politics message board poster called Obama.)
The blog Sadly, No, reports that the Yahoo! politics message board participant whose quote made both the Journal and the Times is one “onlinebeerbellygirl” and his/her comment came in response to a query Chozick, the Journal reporter, apparently posted on that Yahoo! board on July 15 (“Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president?”).
Which became, more or less, the basis for pieces in two of the country’s Most Important Newspapers. Yahoo!
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.