No foolin’

Politico London Playbook’s Jack Blanchard reminds me: This is the day you’re meant to spot the absurd, fictional, no-way-can-this-actually-be-happening stories hidden away among the real news in each newspaper. Blanchard adds: Good luck with that this year.

I think this proposition applies to a story originally reported by Yashar Ali in a lengthy Twitter thread (also compiled in David Rutz’s Free Beacon story).

I’m a long-time follower of Ali on Twitter. I started following him because he picks up interesting stories. This particular story is a first-person account deriving from this past Friday. It’s a story of the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me variety, but Ali wasn’t fooling around. The story graphically illustrates what many of us believe to be the case about the tight relationship between the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. Ali himself is a a New York Magazine/HuffPost contributor.

Rutz extracts the story embedded in Ali’s Twitter thread. Dan Gainor has a brief account posted at FOX News. The New York Post has also picked up the story. Here is Rutz’s summary:

Reporter Yashar Ali claimed in a lengthy Twitter thread Friday that an NBC News managing editor called “to bully me on behalf of the DNC” over a report he was about to publish on the first debates of the Democratic presidential primary season.

Dismissing it as a scoop of no particular significance, Ali tweeted about learning the first Democratic debates would be held June 26 and 27 and broadcast on NBC, liberal cable arm MSNBC, and Spanish-language station Telemundo. He described calling the DNC to confirm the story and being asked to delay it so the national committee could inform state parties; he said he declined, as he was running out of time before MSNBC would announce the news nugget itself.

Then, things got stranger. He laid out getting a phone call from Dafna Linzer, the managing editor overseeing political coverage for NBC News and MSNBC.

“After exchanging pleasantries, Dafna told me that she received a call from the DNC and was told I had a story,” Ali tweeted. “Now it’s not strange that the DNC called her, they were coordinating an announcement. What was strange was that she was calling me and taking a menacing tone. She asked if I could hold the story and I said I couldn’t. She was agitated, ‘why not?’ I said I’m not going to lose a scoop. Then she got angrier and said ‘Why not? It’s not a big deal, let them make a few phone calls.'”

“My jaw dropped,” he went on. “I realized that @DafnaLinzer, the head of all political coverage for NBC News and MSNBC wasn’t calling to advocate for her network, she was calling to advocate the DNC’s position. She wanted me to wait so they could call state party leaders.”

Ali described Linzer as growing increasingly exasperated with him and said she was harkening back to her time as a Washington Post reporter, saying she delayed stories all the time for security reasons.

“I was so surprised that she was talking this way with a total stranger,” he tweeted. “The head of the political division was trying to bully me at the behest of the DNC over a dumb scoop (even though they may not have asked her to).”

Ali said Linzer sought to go off the record well into their conversation—he didn’t agree—and wanted to speak to his editor, which he took as a threat. He ended the conversation and concluded his Twitter thread on the matter by wondering why Linzer would open herself up to criticism over her behavior toward him.

Analyze this: “NBC PR told CNN’s Brian Stelter that they and Linzer have no comment on Ali’s allegation.”