Michael Graham: Perhaps you've heard about his firing. And perhaps the first time you ever heard of Michael Graham was because of his firing.
But those of us in Charleston know that the real scandal isn't that Graham called the entire religion of Islam a "terrorist organization" on his talk radio program -- it's that somebody gave Graham a talk radio job in the first place.
Anyway, don't weep for this dweeb -- before he was fired, he was just a face in the crowd. But by getting himself canned, he's now near the top of the Technorati "talk-about" list, and he'll wind up landing on his feet, probably in mid-strut. Personally, I suspect he did the whole thing for attention.
Graham's politics are asinine, but who cares? What we learned about him from his time as a talk radio "personality" in Charleston was that for all his bitching about the media, Graham never let the facts get in the way of a good rant. Graham aligned himself with the Lowcountry's lunatic fringe and filled the local airwaves with "scoops" and "inside information" that he was getting straight out of the mouths of a handful of people. On such foundations are great careers launched.
And how do I know this? Because those same people were telling me the same things. Only over at the newspaper, we were in the habit of checking out rumors before preaching them as gospel truth. Which, by the way, they typically weren't.
Graham, however, would go straight from whispered tip to full-force scorn and derision, and he did this without doing any basic journalism -- like, for instance, calling the newspaper reporters and editors he routinely accused of covering up the truth and asking them about the charges he was leveling against them. He didn't call because he didn't want to know. And I didn't call him on his bullshit because I didn't want to give him a new toy to play with.
This is the way the game is played, boys and girls: You just keep throwing paranoid, victimized, half-truths on the wall, and while you do it, you repeat over and over that the reason the stuff looks so weird is because The Media is conspiring to keep it hidden.
Eventually your antics get you fired by the adults in the room, and then you're set for life: A martyr without sacrifice, a hero without principle, a celebrity without substance. Congratulations, Michael: You've hit the hypocrite trifecta.
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