Conversation with an old talk radio reporter.

So, the other week I popped into this one bar just north of my house for a nightcap after hitting up new bars after the storm, because they have cheap PBR drafts.

And, the (white) (older) guy at the bar next to me turned out to be an old talk radio reporter with a taste for politics.

“I broke a serial killer story back in the mid-90s,” he told me.  “Black hookers were turning up in dumpsters.”

He then said that the police were covering up that they thought it was a serial killer, but a source inside the department gave him tips, and so he would request the police reports as his source told him they came in, and no-one could figure out where he was getting his information from.

And, because the police wouldn’t really speak to him, he had to go out to two major viaducts in the city, to talk with (black) hookers there and get some interview taped to fill up airtime.

“What’d they say?”, I was like.  

"Oh, that they were afraid, that she was a nice person who fell on hard times, always the same thing,” he was like.  "It was kind of repetitive."

  

“But,” he was like, “I had to get tape.”

Later, I share with him my one idea of a petition to the state attorney general, as an exercise in academic politics.

He loved it, and gave me some tips.

First, if it's big enough, people will report on it no matter what, since they don't have to determine it's true, just that people are going around saying it.

Furthermore, he said, to set the attorney general in motion, create “motivation, but with plausible deniability.”