WaPo Reporter Shooting Self in Eye with Toy Gun is ‘Perfect Metaphor for Media in 2016’
Normally, journalists just shoot themselves in the foot.
12.29.2016
38
AWashington Post reporter admitted in an article published on Thursday that he shot himself in the eye with a toy gun after coming home all pumped up over digging up scoop on Donald Trump.
David Fahrenthold spent a year covering Trump and published a memoir of sorts bragging about how his reporting led to proving that Trump wasn’t the “Teflon candidate” he was touted to be. Specifically, it was Fahrenthold’s pressing of Trump’s charity donations that put him in the spotlight for a brief moment in time during the campaign:
Because my stories had led to this angry moment, I was on “Morning Joe” and CNN and Lawrence O’Donnell. The New York Times and Le Monde referenced my work. My dad wrote to say how proud he was of me. I read pundits predicting that the presidential race itself would change. They said the old trope about Trump — that he was a Teflon candidate, immune to accountability — was now disproved.
Caught up in the excitement of his new-found 15 minutes of fame, or as he put it, “still full of caffeine and do-gooder energy,” Fahrenthold came home and felt like cleaning up the mess his kids left behind. That’s when he saw it:
Among the clutter on the coffee table, I found my 4-year-old’s Party Popper, a bright yellow gun that fired confetti. For some reason, I held the gun up to my eye and looked down the barrel, the way Yosemite Sam always does.It looked unloaded.Then, for some reason, I pulled the trigger.
That’s TWO of the cardinal rules of firearm safety broken right away: treat every firearm as if it’s loaded, and never point the gun towards anything you don’t wish to destroy. And yet, the media pretend to be the premiere Second Amendment experts.
His story continues:
When I got to the ER, I had a swollen face, metal-foil confetti in my hair and a faint odor of gun smoke. Finally, the doctor could see me.“I shot myself in the eye with a glitter gun,” I said. I showed him the Party Popper, which I had brought with me, in case he wanted to send it off to the National Institute of Morons for further study.I got home from the hospital with a scratched cornea and a tube of eye ointment.
A BBC Global correspondent read this story and came to an appropriate conclusion in this era of "fake news:"
And as Twitchy noted, Fahrenthold did a report on the GOP candidates and their guns last year. Apparently, he didn’t dig as much into that subject as he did with Trump:
But it’s not all Fahrenthold’s fault; he just referenced the handy “Journalist’s Guide to Firearms Identification” and “glitter gun” wasn’t on the list:
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